Systemic Inequality From the Classroom to the Boardroom
Sixteen months into the pandemic and we can still see COVID-19 in our rear-view mirror. Health statistics show that people of color have been the most impacted by the pandemic; the black community makes up 13% of the US population but suffered 39% of COVID-related deaths. Even though COVID-19 virus was technically color-blind it was devastating to those in lower socio-economic circumstances.
This is the same population that has been disproportionately affected by the after-shock of COVID: remote learning. Students with fewer resources and less internet access that had to adapt to a learn-from-home environment found it difficult to keep up with students who were not resource-constrained. Education experts have observed a widening of the learning gap between economic classes during the pandemic, and for current high school students this gap may be unbridgeable.
For underserved minorities there is one silver lining from COVID and remote learning: the postponement of the SAT/ACT tests in 2020 and 2021 for health and safety reasons. These tests have been one of the pillars of systemic inequality for 40 years, as they favor the white and the wealthy. The ripple effect of this postponement has been dramatic:
- More applicants (not only of color) have applied to more top-tier schools. Applications to Harvard this past year increased by 47%, applications to MIT increased by 66%.
- Admissions departments that suspended the SAT/ACT requirement have been forced to develop different criteria for evaluating applicants.
- For the academic year just ended, a higher percentage of underserved minority students were admitted to and are attending top-tier colleges this year. Black students at Harvard and Cornell were 15% of their freshman class, compared to the Ivy League average of 8% prior to the pandemic. At USC, the percent of black students admitted rose from 6.5% to 8%; the percent of LatinX students admitted rose from 15% to 18%. At NYU, the percent of first-generation students accepted rose from 15% to 20%.
It is ironic (or perhaps a small piece of justice) that the pandemic that afflicted black and brown communities with greater mortality and morbidity may be the primary contributor to greater mobility.
This is obviously positive news for underserved minority students, along with the fact that hundreds of universities and colleges are planning to eliminate test score requirements even after the pandemic ends. But the bigger win is coming 3-4 years from now, when this larger cohort of minority students graduate and join the select pool of employment prospects for top companies to consider. The Classes of 2024 and 2025 will produce a bumper crop of talented graduates who will have more and better opportunities for underserved minorities than any period in American history.
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But before we hold the victory parade, we should recognize that employment and career success for minority candidates will be far from automatic. Getting through the Higher Ed admissions gauntlet could be a walk across the quad compared to competing in the open job market. Consider that the most selective of all educational paths (getting into medical school) admits around 6% of applicants. According to a study by Lever, the ratio of job applications to hire at a large American corporation is 127-to-1, or less than 1%. For underserved minority candidates to receive a meaningful benefit from this window of increased opportunity at selective Higher Ed institutions, hiring companies need to make a meaningful change to their recruitment and hiring practices.
Human Resource departments and Admissions offices are built from the same blueprint. Both are trying to balance the composition of their employee/student population and the budgetary limits of the organization. Both departments are designed to preserve the status quo of their organizations, and thus are generally risk averse. Both are predominantly staffed by women (75% of HR professionals are women, as are 70% of admissions staff at entry and mid-management level), who typically operate best in an environment of harmony and stability and have a low appetite for disruption.
To level the playing field for minority job applicants, HR departments can improve by acting less like Admissions offices. The most selective schools pursue diverse applicants from elite private prep schools who are largely from the same socio-economic strata as their majority wealthy white applicants. They can check the box for racial diversity, but not for social equality. In the same vein, companies that sort, evaluate and screen in candidates who come from the top schools, played the right sports (lacrosse and squash, not football or baseball) and held internships at top-tier companies will produce a pool of people who have had an economic advantage throughout their lives. This is standard practice in industries such as financial services, management consulting companies, law firms, and medical-related fields. It’s not just people of color who are systematically excluded by this hiring screen, but really anyone coming from a middle-class economic background and lower. Viewing diversity as mainly a racial issue is missing half the point; it needs to be addressed as an issue of classism.
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Cultural change for successful companies happens at a glacial pace. Procter & Gamble began recruitment for diverse managerial talent in the 1980s but did not have a senior leader for diversity until 1999. P&G is a conservative midwestern company with a predominantly white, male executive suite, so it’s not entirely shocking that the first manager with “diversity” in the job title was Pat Collins, a self-described “50-year-old white guy from Notre Dame”. Prior to this role Collins was a successful sales manager with a reputation for developing young talent. From 1999 to 2006, Collins’ mission at P&G was to recruit and mentor young multicultural and female managers on how to leverage their unique experiences, characteristics, and skills to achieve results. Importantly, he collaborated with senior P&G managers to develop processes and systems to enable diverse managers to make rapid career progress. Collins conveyed to me recently, “Inclusion from the rank-and-file members of the organization is just as critical to change culture as leadership commitment.”
Collins left P&G in 2006 and started his own consulting firm where he assisted companies to strategize and achieve their diversity goals in the areas of recruitment, retention, and management development. He recognized a consistent organizational pattern in his client companies, which ranged from rail transportation to foodservice restaurants to professional sports teams. “Senior [c-suite] executives make their Human Resource people responsible for two deliverables: bring in talent that is the right fit for the business, and also make their diversity numbers. At the companies that are successful in accomplishing both goals, their HR leaders came out of the field, supporting the line functions. They have the nuanced understanding of the hard and soft skills that minority candidates need to succeed in that specific culture.”
Collins also observes that companies devote most of their organizational attention to recruit and hire minorities and women, but comparatively less energy to retain and develop them, thus creating a churn cycle that can become part of the firm’s reputation. “If diversity isn’t a performance criteria for every manager in the company, then you can’t expect it to become accepted company culture.” He shares an example the type of cultural awareness that needs to be baked into a more sophisticated diversity practice. “One of my clients had a long-standing policy of transferring young managers to different office locations around the country as part of their training. When African-American and LatinX trainees started to drop out of the program (at a faster rate than white trainees), they discovered that they hadn’t taken into account how important proximity to family was for these groups.” Once the company stopped requiring re-location and instituted training in place, they saw a significance increase in job satisfaction, feeling of inclusion, and retention. Which will ultimately lead to a larger pool of minority management candidates to grow into bigger roles in this company.
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A broader diversity solution will mean addressing institutionalized classism and removing the façade of schools and companies who proclaim a desire to create greater access for underserved minorities but aren’t changing any of the entrenched behavior that makes this access virtually impossible. At my company (CareerMap), we plan to contribute to this broader solution by bringing new insights about career paths for underserved minorities into the conversation. We’ve all just banded together to virtually defeat the deadliest pandemic in our lifetimes — so we are familiar with the necessary level of unity and resolve to thwart the systemic inequality that continues to threaten our disadvantaged communities.
Tim Guen is President of CareerMap and blogs frequently about the challenges of managing careers during the pandemic.