Your Questions / Our Answers
Workplace Equity & Racial Justice Webinar
November 18, 2020
Olivia Knight, As You Sow Racial Justice Initiative Coordinator
Meredith Benton, As You Sow Workplace Equity Program Manager & Whistle Stop Capital Principal
Patience Marime-Ball, CEO, Women of the World Endowments
Andrew Behar, CEO, As You Sow (Moderator)
Can we input a company ticker on the site versus clicking on multiple links to find that company data?
You can select a company listed alphabetically on the second level page in the upper right hand corner. We do not provide tickers; but we may consider it in the future.
Does As You Sow support complementary workplace equity research initiatives?
We would need to evaluate the methodology and content of another data set before we would consider cross-integration.
Why not focus on the diversity of the board, or board oversight of workplace equity?
Board diversity is important, but without companies releasing their workforce composition, recruitment, retention and promotion data, we don't know the extent to which the board is impacting corporate culture. It is a heavy load to expect that the 35% of the board that is diverse will ensure that a 10,000 person company has fair and equitable work practices. This may not be the expertise of the diverse board member, nor may they wish to have this become an assumed responsibility.
Interesting about how those with least disclosure have made the most promises. Analogue: A recent paper on greenwashing showed that funds that greenwash the most perform the worst.
It is, absolutely, a concern that companies feel comfortable making extensive comments around workplace equity without feeling the same compulsion to provide supporting data.
I trust that participants will be told where they can go to sign on to the shareholder statement.
https://www.asyousow.org/our-work/gender-workplace-equity-disclosure-statement
Is this only for-profit data or is data available for the non-profit sector?
This data set focuses on the S&P 500, all for-profit publicly traded companies.
How frequently will you be reevaluating scores? Should companies contact you directly if they increase disclosures or want to direct you to additional public information? Thank you! Future 500 here, we'll be relaying your data points and comments to all our partners. (corporate partners, that is)
We plan to release the rest of the S&P 500 by early February 2021 and to maintain the data on a monthly basis.
Are you saying that you have reason to believe that companies are collecting this data internally, but not willing to disclose it to organizations like yours? What makes you think they're collecting them at all?
Whistle Stop, oftentimes on behalf of As You Sow, has contacted over 70 companies in the last year about the workplace equity practices. In our conversations, we have heard of a range of practices - from companies that have developed extensive internal dashboards which are regularly reviewed by the board (an action we consider best practice) to companies that have conducted little or no internal review of their diversity and inclusion data. These companies are very concerning.
Are you attempting to define gender, ethnic data for key decision makers within firms, and not just the entire company?
We are not defining these key terms. We are utilizing the definitions put in place by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
How can we find info on companies in other countries, Europe, Toronto Stock Exchange, etc.?
We have some EU companies that are in the S&P. With additional funding we may expand to other countries.
How do you address or make allowances for sexual and gender minorities of colour in the workplace, considering diversity, equity, and inclusion? Often, sexual and gender minorities experience multiple stressors and increased discrimination aside from racial discrimination
Agreed. We have relatively little data that addresses the needs of these employees. The current data sets, even those that are best practice, unfortunately, are not providing the data at that level.
Have you considered women's health as a gender lens, including their sexual and reproductive health? Our partners at Equileap gather some data on this. look at Gender Free Funds. we aggregate the 19 KPIs for mutual funds https://genderequalityfunds.org/? will share what we did regarding women's health and sexual and reproductive health and rights. It doesn’t address racial justice though. this is something I want to explore further in the work I do:
We are considering this and many other additional KPIs in the future.
Did you evaluate your own organization, and how did that go?
We are not a public corporation so we have different disclosure requirements. That said, we scored well and also saw places to improve that we are putting into practice.
I struggle with companies like Blackrock being a "leader" given that they are one of the largest funders of private prisons...so, I hesitate to include them on the top list. Any thoughts?
Their fund family does not score well on Prison Free Funds as you can see at this link. They also score poorly on other metrics like voting on climate resolutions and CEO Pay; yet they should be given credit where it is due. Their leadership in Workplace Equity disclosure is among the best.
For Global companies, the US standard "ethnicity" is not really applicable globally. Nationality is also often not enough. Any suggestion on how to compute diversity globally?
Agreed. This is challenging and likely one of the reasons that we see greater reporting on gender. Our recommendation is to view this as a broader report on traditionally under-represented groups; breaking down, then, by location, which groups require additional protection and intentionality in order to be allowed to contribute meaningfully.
Is there consideration of adding disclosure as to the level of an organization's board oversight and reporting of the organization's workplace equity goals, objections and ongoing progress?
We will consider this in the future. Right now we are focussed on disclosure and soon we will turn our attention to the actual policies and practices.
How do very small (8 employees) participate. We are a B-Corporation.
Unless you are publicly traded and in the S&P 500 we cannot include you in this scorecard.
Are you looking at rating funds and exchange-traded funds?
How did you settle on the inclusion metrics? They seem straight forward. Do you see promotion rates as an "outcome" of inclusion strategies i.e. Employee resource groups (ERGs), etc.
Correct. We see the inclusion metrics as indications of the success of the inclusion strategies, such as employee resource groups, bias trainings, etc.
If I am understanding the data set, it sounds like it's based on the EEO-1 disclosure and so not a representative sample. How should we think about the skew based on the sample. Shows a better performance (as it's the companies that chose to disclose)?
The intention of this database is to track the disclosures that companies have made. We do not yet assess the numbers that they provide. Disclosure in-and-of-itself is valuable and a sign of leadership.
Do you offer companies the opportunity to provide feedback?
We reached out to companies for workplace equity disclosure. On Racial Justice, we evaluated publicly available data and plan to engage several companies this year.
Why not take into account the racial justice implications of a company’s business model or products? What about lobbying and political contributions?
We hope to incorporate key performance indicators (KPIs) on both lobbying and political contributions in the near future. We believe that incorporating KPIs regarding a company’s business model and products is necessary to fully understand corporate actions on racial justice.
What are best practices in categories (in race/ethnicity/gender) that are clear but meaningful (especially with many people identifying in more than one of traditional categories)
As companies provide more data, it will allow for the analysis needed to answer questions like this one. As of right now, we just don't have enough information to say which corporate diversity programs are most effective.
How are you dealing with concerns about Racial Justice-related resolutions being tossed out because it’s micromanaging?
We believe that our resolutions will win if challenged in a no-action as they are material.