Companies ranked by diversity in gender and race, equity in recruitment
By Jacquelyn Smith
Diversity is good for business.
"If you manage a company to be as fair as possible, then you will have
the best possible workforce, the best possible customers, the best
possible suppliers, and the smartest investors," explains Luke Visconti,
CEO and founder of DiversityInc.
To find the companies that are doing this particularly well,
DiversityInc invited thousands of companies to fill out a survey with
roughly 300 questions. Over 1,600 companies participated in this year's
survey, which measured human capital in seven variables, including
gender and race; fairness and equity from recruitment to development and
retention; and supplier diversity.
"If you're looking for job, or an investment opportunity, or a company
to do business with, this list is very important," Visconti says. "It's
metrics-driven, and the ranking primarily reflects fairness in human
capital results, including five levels of management."
Here are the
25 most diverse companies in the US:
The DiversityInc Top 50 companies are significantly more diverse than
the average American corporation. Compared with statistics from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
these companies have 20% more Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in
management, and 13% more women. At the top 10 companies, the contrast is
even greater, with 41% more Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, and 46% more
women than the average US company.
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation ranks No. 1 this year.
"They're consistently high performers across everything we measure, but
what is most noteworthy about them is that they have a woman CEO and 60%
of her direct reports are women," Visconti says. "For a scientific
company, this is amazing performance — but keep in mind that women have
earned more bachelor's degrees than men since the late 1980s. If
everything were fair, and corporate America truly selected for talent
and accomplishments, most Fortune 500 companies would look like this."
