McKinsey report - Race in the workplace: The Black experience in the US private sector | Shereen Daniels

“95 years for Black workers to reach talent parity.”

This was the stat shared on page 10 of the latest McKinsey report - Race in the workplace: The Black experience in the US Private Sector.

Their report looks at the Black employees within the private sector and focuses on three parts:

1. Their participation in the entire US private-sector economy
2. Their representation, advancement, and experiences within those companies
3. A path forward, including addressing the key challenges and actions companies can take

The research analyzed overall employment data from 24 companies, including some of the largest private-sector employers in the United States, who participated in this research across their total of about 3.7 million US employees. The research also analyzed data on employee experience gathered through a combination of focus groups, interviews, and an inclusion-and experience survey with nearly 25,000 respondents. 

I’m not going to regurgitate the whole report, yet I do want to pull out some key statistics before I share my thoughts:

• Black employees are under-represented in the highest growth geographies and the highest paid industries.
• They are over-represented in low-growth geographies and in frontline jobs, which tend to pay less.
• 45% of Black private sector employees (6.7 million people) work in three industries that have a large frontline-service presence: healthcare, retail, accommodation and food service.
• Black employees are under-represented in IT, professional services and financial services.
• More Black private-sector workers, 43%, make less than $30,000 per year, compared with 29% of the rest of private-sector employees.
• Black workers believe their organisations are less fair, accepting and authentic.
• Automation will prove disruptive to the labor force in the years to come, but its impact won’t be evenly distributed.
• Black workers face higher hurdles to gainful employment than do the rest of the labor force, creating stark disparities. For example, the employment rate for Black workers with some college or an associate’s degree are similar to the total population of workers who have a high-school diploma.

What the report doesn't mention

“Over the past 30 years, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), specifically for Black workers through the ranks, has become an increasing priority for the US private sector.”

Has there?

Has there really been a focus specifically for Black workers? In the US or anywhere else?

They may have been outreach to ‘diverse’ groups but do we believe there has been a focus on building a culture which works for Black people to overcome the barriers they face in the workplace?

Why aren't we asking how DEI has risen in prominence and popularity, yet here we are still attempting to address a 400-year issue, where progress has stalled or in some cases gone backwards?

What the report doesn’t talk about is how DEI has been hijacked to advance the cause of everyone else bar Black people. Even though it came out of the civil rights movement in the US.

It also doesn't highlight how a discomfort in talking about race, has led to surface level solutions, tokenistic and performative in some cases, where the threshold for success is arbitrarily and sometimes, deliberately low.

We have focused on visual representation and made it a numbers game. Yet those numbers have a cap. Provided you have at least one ‘diverse’ person in the team, leading a department or on the board, it's job done.

How can we claim to have made progress with the people and DEI space if we have never spoken about race? If we stutter over saying the word Black and recoil from conversations which attempt to impart knowledge about white supremacy and racist ideology?

How can we claim to have made progress if we are too uncomfortable with prioritising Black people because we're worried about how our white majority peers, colleagues and workforce will feel?

How can we claim to be pro-equity when I hear daily, the comment ‘let’s not focus on one protected characteristic.’ This way of thinking has led us here.  

Today.  

HR and by extension DEI practitioners have to lead from the front and that means ensuring there is a:

• Willingness to learn and unlearn.
• Examination as to how the profession and our individual behaviour has and continues to perpetuate white supremacy.
• Genuine desire to listen and learn from Black practitioners who are doing the work, are credible and knowledgeable, rather than amplifying and prioritising the voices of people who look like them, to act as the authority on Black.
• Bravery in calling out performative actions, by fellow practitioners and the various networks, conferences and panels who claim to be anti-racist, yet still cannot give focused airtime to this subject.
• Understanding that the presence of Black people, or lack thereof, from a numbers point of view, does not mean you don't have an issue with racism.

The issue isn't that we don't have the data to highlight the scale of inequalities which block economic advancement.

It's because we've turned a blind eye.

And no matter how many reports are created, this will not change unless there is a willingness to embrace discomfort and 'strategically prioritise interventions.'

Because as a reminder, it will take 95 years, at our current trajectory, for Black employees (in the US) to reach talent parity. 

McKinsey report - Race in the workplace: The Black experience in the US private sector is available here. 

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With 90 people already signed up, check out our next webinar specifically for in-house HR/DEI leads. Leanne Mair and I will go through:

• The importance of contextualising your leadership development programme
• How you do that bearing in mind your Black colleagues might not trust you or the organisation
• Considerations for designing internally
• Considerations for bringing in suppliers

Link to register is here.