Jobs may be scarce in the time of COVID-19, but one position many local companies appear to be filling is that of diversity and inclusion managers.
And this time it may work.
“In 2016 similar [Black Lives Matter] outrage occurred and few companies took action,” said Stefanie K. Johnson, a diversity expert at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. “But this movement feels very different.”
And it is more than a feeling for Johnson, who has published scores of articles on the subject of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) including pieces in the Economist, Newsweek, Time, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Washington Post. She has presented her work at more than 170 meetings around the world, in particular at the 2016 White House summit on diversity in corporate America.
Johnson said more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, 270, issued statements regarding this summer’s BLM turbulence. Somewhat closer to home a Top 10 accounting firm, Crowe Horwath of Denver, has already set deliberate and substantive goals in gaining diversity in its hiring. Other companies — including Ball Corp., the Rocky Mountain Institute and Country Day Schools — were searching for diversity and inclusivity managers.
“A good number of those companies are making strong commitments,” Johnson said. “A lot of companies have made statements, but they’ve also defined practices and set specific goals.”
In a recent article Johnson penned for MarketWatch, Johnson noted that the clothing retailer Gap…
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