Push is set for workplace diversity
Minority, female presence tracked
Massachusetts civic leaders and business executives are preparing a major push to improve the diversity of the state's workforce by keeping closer track of the numbers of minority and female employees.
The new push comes less than a year after a detailed survey showed that the state's largest businesses and nonprofit institutions are led almost exclusively by white men.
Leaders of the effort, including former Suffolk district attorney Ralph C. Martin II and Steve Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, say the state's institutions need to take public action to improve diversity and counter a perception, lingering since the busing controversy of the 1970s, that Massachusetts has a hostile racial climate.
"We have a branding problem in Boston, but we also have a real problem in Boston," Crosby said.
Seventy-six institutions, from
Employers will agree to supply demographic data on their workforce, executive team, and applicant pool to a central database and commit to taking steps to improve their diversity. The Commonwealth Compact will, in turn, report to the public on the diversity of the state's workforce, categorized by the type of business or institution.
The public reports will not include details on each company's workforce, which one diversity specialist said weakened the initiative's potential impact. But Martin said the program is focused on "collective accountability," and won't point the finger at individual employers.
"There's an old saying, 'That which gets measured, gets done,' " said Martin, a managing partner of Bingham McCutchen, a law firm that is one of the early signers of the compact. "We're going to throw our lot in with each other and represent in a very transparent way whether or not our industries are making progress."
Organizers said the urgency of their effort was reflected in a pair of studies that showed that diversity is lacking in Massachusetts.
A study released in May 2007 by UMass-Boston showed that 94 percent of the board members of the state's largest corporations were white and about 87 percent of them were men. An earlier survey by the McCormack Graduate School found that a majority of respondents, including 75 percent of blacks and 67 percent of Latinos, believed race relations in the state were only fair or poor.
With that data in hand, and with the election of Patrick as the first black governor, Crosby said, the timing seemed right to launch a statewide effort.
"We're making this huge symbolic breakthrough," Crosby said. "Can we seize the moment to take this symbolic breakthrough and squeeze it through the whole structure of our community and ultimately change both the brand and the reality?"
In addition to Crosby and Martin, Boston Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley is the third principal organizer of the Commonwealth Compact. Robert L. Turner, a former Globe editor and columnist who holds a Globe-sponsored fellowship at UMass-Boston, is director of the initiative. The newspaper has contributed $15,000 of the $200,000 raised to date for the project, Crosby said.
Eric Peterson, manager of diversity and inclusion initiatives for the Society of Human Resource Management, said he is not aware of any other states where companies have participated in similar projects. He said it could work, as long as institutions pay attention to more than just numbers of minority and female workers.
"An organization can build a very inclusive climate and do all the right things and the numbers aren't going to change until years later," Peterson said. "A lot of organizations will get in trouble if they try to build numbers for themselves in the short term and don't build an inclusive culture for the long term."
Another workforce diversity specialist said the impact of the initiative would be minimal because the organizers are planning to release only aggregate data by industry, not specific employment data on the participating companies.
Marc Bendick, a workforce diversity consultant based in Washington, D.C., said the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission already requires companies with more than 100 employees to report information on workforce diversity and those data are reported publicly in aggregate terms.
"Discrimination reported that way is a villainy without a villain," Bendick said. "You cannot identify where the problem is. Until you put pressure on companies through shame or possible litigation to change their behavior, you're not really going to accomplish anything that's different from what's long prevailed under EEOC reporting requirements."
Even signing a pledge to improve diversity, as the Commonwealth Compact requires, is of little help, Bendick argued.
"Companies that make those pledges tend to have a slightly higher representation of underrepresented groups, but it is very marginal," he said. "This is not a very effective way to move employment practices forward."
Crosby said he accepts "healthy skepticism" of the initiative at this early stage.
John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.
