Greater ESG data still leaves questions unanswered

Many more publicly traded companies are disclosing their workforce demographics, but the numbers show some sobering realities about the representation of women and minorities.

The share of companies fully disclosing the data they must provide each year to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has soared to 95% among S&P 100 firms from only 17% in January 2020; to 73.8% for firms on the S&P 500 from 5.4%; and to 43.6% of the Russell 1000 from just 3.4%, according to a report earlier this month by research firm DiversIQ. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd three years ago, large wealth management firms and other big publicly traded companies had vowed to share more employee demographic statistics.

Corporations also promised to hire, retain and promote more Black employees, but those words ring hollow a few years later. The percentage of publicly traded firms with representation proportional to the 12% share of the Black population of America remains low, at just a third of S&P 500 in terms of their total workforce, less than 9% at the middle manager level and just 3% among their executives and senior managers. 

The number of managers who are Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native people displays a positive correlation with a firm’s cash flow, net profit, three- and five-year revenue, five-year return on equity and stock values, according to a study by shareholder advocacy group As You Sow last year.

“It seems like, under the hood, either they’re not making the effort or a lot of these companies struggle to make change and move the needle,” DiversIQ CEO Joshua Ramer said in an interview.

The companies that have made greater progress on disclosing their data and boosting the representation of women and minorities “want to build a great culture” to hire and retain their teams, as opposed to focusing purely on numbers and thresholds, Ramer added. “The companies that do this really understand their workforce and what they care about and what’s important to them.”

The figures on women and Hispanic Americans working at the largest companies reflect a similar picture to those of Black Americans, according to the DiversIQ report. Only around a quarter of the firms on any of the three indices have hired the same share of women as there are across America, with 2% or less having proportional representation in their executive and senior management ranks. Just four S&P 500 and Russell 1000 companies have reported executive suites with the same portion of Latinos as across the U.S. 

Meanwhile, 41 companies in the S&P 500 have executive suites that are at least 90% white, with an “especially large presence of white managers and executives at America’s 100 largest companies,” the report stated. Asian Americans have made greater gains in representation than other minorities.

“[Out of] the ten largest employers of Asian Americans, by a percentage of their total workforce, all are in the information technology sector,” the report stated. “At these companies, Asian Americans are prominent in the overall workforce and the management level, but when it comes to executive positions, their representation slightly erodes.”

DiversIQ analyzed EEOC data from 369 companies in the S&P and 433 firms from the Russell 1000 at the beginning of May to create “the most comprehensive EEO-1 dataset anywhere in the world,” the study said, referring to the name of the government agency’s annual reports.

Companies in wealth management and the rest of financial services have earned a range of grades from independent experts in terms of their disclosures and overall racial equity impact. As a sector, its rate of 42.9% of firms in the Russell 1000 publicly stating their EEOC stats and 76.9% of S&P 500 closely track averages across those entire indices. 

A backlash among conservative groups arguing ESG data isn’t material to shareholder results has boosted the number of proxy votes to a record level and added a political layer to the discussion, though.

An “inevitable” future regulation requiring more ESG disclosures in the U.S. should offer a reminder for firms to “start figuring out how they’re going to comply with that,” said Reid Thomas, a managing director of United Kingdom-based private wealth, investment management and technology firm JTC. Large firms doing business in Europe already face “very strict” ESG standards that go beyond merely reporting diversity figures, Thomas said in an interview.

“Investors are going to invest in line with their values and their passions, so it becomes a personal decision for the investor,” Thomas said. “Increasingly, companies who want to attract investors will need to talk about these things.”

For his part, Ramer said he’s “skeptical about mandates and requiring every company to disclose something.” Many ethnicities and nationalities can get obscured among Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and other groups when the data is “forcing people to self-identify in these boxes that might not represent who they actually are,” he said. 

Other ways to evaluate companies such as their human rights records and supply-chain labor standards don’t come out in the EEOC data. The figures fail to capture the actual amount that firms are investing in recruiting, hiring and retaining team members as well. 

In the absence of a clear, universal “standard for how they should be reporting it,” the companies’ EEOC numbers represent “a placeholder for the best that we have, in lieu of something better,” Ramer said.

“All of these companies are talking about how important diversity and inclusion are to them,” he said. “We are reliant on what the companies gather and what they report publicly to determine whether they’re actually doing what they say they’re doing.”