Tag: California AB 979
California mandates board diversity for “underrepresented communities”
Social unrest currently roiling the U.S. body politic has brought systemic racial inequity and injustice into sharp focus. Why, after decades of public statements and corporate commitments to enhancing racial diversity has so little progress been made? Because, as it’s often said, change starts at the top, one avenue to begin to address these issues is to increase the number of African-Americans and ethnic and other underrepresented minorities represented on boards of directors. Yesterday afternoon, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 979, designed to do for “underrepresented communities” on boards of directors what SB 826 did for board gender diversity. (See this PubCo post.) As reported in the Sacramento Bee, prior to signing the bill, Newsom said that “[w]hen we talk about racial justice, we talk about empowerment, we talk about power and we need to talk about seats at the table.”
Will companies accede to calls for actions to improve racial and ethnic diversity in hiring and promotion? California considers a new mandate for racial/ethnic board diversity
In this excellent NYT article from early June, the author painfully explores the view of many African-American executives that, notwithstanding the public condemnations of racism by many public companies and the “multimillion-dollar pledges to anti-discrimination efforts and programs to support black businesses,” still, many of these companies “have contributed to systemic inequality, targeted the black community with unhealthy products and services, and failed to hire, promote and fairly compensate black men and women. ‘Corporate America has failed black America,” said [the African-American president of the Ford Foundation]. ‘Even after a generation of Ivy League educations and extraordinary talented African-Americans going into corporate America, we seem to have hit a wall.’” In the article, a number of Black executives offer recommendations for actions companies should take to begin to implement the needed systemic transformation. And now, third parties—from proxy advisors to institutional investors to legislators—are taking steps to induce companies to take some of these actions. Will they make a difference?
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