The group of companies in our data set employs more than 9 million people in the US at some of the country’s largest and most lucrative firms, in industries from tech to finance, including Apple Inc., Walmart Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.
“Those are astounding percentages,” said David Larcker, the director of the Corporate Governance Research Initiative at Stanford University.
The reasons for the changes are complex and may be unique to a specific moment in time. In 2021, companies were hiring lots of people while prioritizing diversity. Many have since cut jobs amid an economic slowdown just as a backlash to corporate diversity efforts grows.
While the biggest shifts in 2021 happened in lower-paying job categories, such as sales workers and admins, the trend also occurred in well-paid and powerful managerial and professional roles. Even at the executive level, more than half the added jobs went to workers of color.
Black workers, who were the initial focus of the diversity push, made some particularly notable gains. Their share of managers and professionals increased at 70 companies in our data set, and they boosted their ranks among executives in nearly as many firms.
For years, companies have blamed the lack of a sufficient recruiting pipeline for why their workplaces don’t reflect the country’s racial and ethnic makeup. White men tend to disproportionately hold the highest-paying roles, and hiring managers have long said that qualified candidates from other backgrounds for elite jobs were few and far between. The latest findings show that when under pressure to hire and promote qualified diverse talent, organizations find a way to do it.
But even such big one-time gains — and losses — represent a relatively small slice of the full picture. The share of executive, managerial and professional roles held by people of color increased by about 2 percentage points compared with 2020. That still leaves most companies in our dataset lopsided, with White people holding a disproportionate share of high-paying jobs at S&P 100 companies.
Many S&P 100 Companies Are Still Mostly White
“Even if it doesn’t move the needle much overall, it shows something happened,” said Larcker. “If it has long-term impact, remains to be seen.”
The data currently available only goes through 2021 — comprehensive data for beyond then doesn’t exist yet — a year in which the US economy added a record number of jobs. Many laid off in the pandemic’s early days were people of color, who were rehired when demand bounced back. The Covid-induced remote-work boom helped some companies expand their footprints in more diverse parts of the country while shrinking in more homogenous communities. Retirements also surged that year, and older workers are more likely to be White.
At companies where overall employment shrank in 2021, White workers made up 68.5% of the losses, another 16.5% were Black, 9.7% were Hispanic and 2.3% were Asian.
The corporate reckoning on institutionalized racism in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder by a White police officer was a factor, too.
“The work was exploding and organizations were just trying to figure out what to do in that very moment,” said Stephanie LaJoie-Lubin, who worked in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging department at CarGurus, a car online review website, at the time and consulted others on the side.
That summer, some companies rebranded products that had long been marketed with racist stereotypes. More pledged hundreds of millions of dollars — and their shelf space — to racial equity efforts. Separately, about half the firms in the S&P 100, including Amazon.com Inc., PepsiCo Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. (then Facebook) and Microsoft Corp., set ambitious targets for increasing their share of people of color in leadership. Amazon set out to double Black vice presidents and directors; Microsoft pledged to double Black managers and senior leaders in the US by 2025.
Among those that didn’t make specific promises, there were public acknowledgements that they needed to do better. Walmart’s CEO said the retailer was “not as diverse as we want to be and aspire to be,” while Nike Inc. and Lowe’s Cos. were among many companies that joined OneTen, a group that aims to get 1 million Black employees middle-class jobs within a decade.
While many of the specific goals were for several years in the future, Bloomberg’s analysis shows progress. Meta, Microsoft, Pepsi and Lowe’s were among 39 firms that increased the number of Black workers across all the top, high-paying job categories: professionals, managers and executives.
Digging into individual companies, different trends emerge: not all boosted diversity at the same rate or in the same ways across job categories.
Nike is one of the more clear-cut examples of the overall trend. Black, Hispanic and Asian people were added at almost every rank up and down the pipeline at the Beaverton, Oregon-based retailer. At the same time, the company lost White workers across the board.
Nike’s US Workforce Underwent Dramatic Shifts at Every Level
- White
- Hispanic
- Black
- Asian
- Other races
Amazon, which hired hundreds of thousands of workers to meet demand from Americans stuck at home with stimulus checks, added people of all races and ethnicities across all job categories. Just over half of the 200,000 workers that the company added in 2021 were Black or Hispanic. Around a third of new managers and around a quarter of new executives were Black or Hispanic.
Amazon Added Workers of All Races and Ethnicities Across Pipeline
- White
- Hispanic
- Black
- Asian
- Other races
CVS Health Corp. looked similar to a typical company’s growth in previous years: White people made up the majority of the job growth at the top, with people of color concentrated in low-level, and often lower-paying jobs.
The health-care giant added 50,000 workers in 2021. Half were people of color — but most work in less-senior roles, with White people making up most of the new jobs at the executive, manager and professional levels.
Most Growth for People of Color at CVS Was in Less-Senior Roles
- White
- Hispanic
- Black
- Asian
- Other races
Spokespeople for Nike, Amazon and CVS declined to discuss the data but said they were committed to diversity and inclusion.
Not all companies boosted diversity. Underrepresented groups of workers lost ground at 14 companies in total. Most of the declines were very slight, with Booking Holdings Inc., United Parcel Service Inc., Mondelez International Inc. and Altria Group Inc. seeing the biggest shifts.
A spokesperson for Booking noted a majority of its employees are based outside of the US. Altria attributed the drop in workers to the sale of one of its operating companies. A UPS spokesperson said the company is committed to hiring and retaining diverse talent. A spokesperson for Mondelez said that mergers, acquisitions and supply chain changes have shifted their employee demographics since 2020, but the company has made progress in management representation for persons of color.
The share of workers of color increased at 74 of 88 companies…
More than a quarter of companies had fewer Black executives in 2021 than in 2020. Three – Costco Wholesale Corp. and chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Broadcom Inc. – had zero Black executives in 2021. Spokespeople from Broadcom and AMD declined to comment. A representative for Costco did not respond to a request for comment.
Read more: There’s One Diversity Initiative Companies Aren’t Likely to Backtrack On
The country’s shifting demographics were at play in the broader trend, said Elise Gould, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that studies policies for low- and middle-income workers. Many people just starting out in their career are from growing Black, Hispanic and Asian populations, who are entering the workforce just as more tenured White employees retire.
That, however, can’t fully account for changes, particularly at the top of the corporate ladder.
After Floyd’s murder, companies adopted several practices to help hire and retain underrepresented workers, including establishing leadership development programs and training managers in inclusive practices. They’re also getting better at identifying broader pools of job candidates, said Donald Knight, chief people officer at Greenhouse Software, which helps companies with equitable hiring practices.
Even at companies that lost workers in 2021, such as Lowe’s and Home Depot Inc., people of color ended the year with a bigger share of the overall workforce. That signals that corporations are being mindful about not just cutting the most recently hired workers, who tend to be people of color, said Crystal Styron, a senior principal in Gartner’s DEI practice.
A variety of reasons make it unlikely that companies have sustained this pace of change since 2021.
While the overall US labor market remains healthy, many companies have announced layoffs. At the same time, the cultural winds have shifted. Support for corporations’ environmental and social policies — which encompass diversity initiatives — has waned as some conservative politicians and policymakers rail against what they’ve labeled “woke capitalism.” Many chief executive officers are wondering if the scope of the Supreme Court’s June ruling on race-based admissions could apply to their own hiring goals.
“We’ve seen three years later how quickly DEI is becoming deprioritized,” said LaJoie-Lubin, who no longer works in-house at a company, but still consults. “And now it’s like, ‘oh well, the business isn’t doing well, so where are we going to cut resources and investments?’ DEI and people teams.”
Companies are reticent to talk about progress that several years ago they might have been keen to acknowledge, according to Esther Silver-Parker, an independent consultant whose previous roles included helping Walmart develop its diversity, equity and inclusion program. Mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion on earnings calls and at conferences among Russell 3,000 Index companies fell by 54% in the third quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. None of the half-dozen companies with the most notable diversity gains wanted to discuss them in detail.
“The stance is just do what we need to do and not talk about it,” Silver-Parker said. “‘Let’s fly under the radar. Let’s not call attention to ourselves. But we know we have a moral obligation and a marketplace obligation.’”
(Updates 22nd paragraph with company comment.)