In this week's Careers Newsletter, read BoF senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young's latest: Is Fashion Done With Diversity Departments?
In 2019, Liela Touré, a public relations lead at a high-end e-commerce retailer, approached the company's leadership about creating an employee resource group for racial-minority staffers. Her first point of contact – the company's global social responsibility manager — told Touré he had already made the suggestion to senior executives several times to no avail.
"It just wasn't a priority,'" she said. "Then, cut to 2020."
As the now-familiar tale goes, after George Floyd's death, the global protests and feedback from Black employees, Touré's company greenlit the employee groups and created a diversity, equity and inclusion committee. Touré, who is Black and Asian, was appointed as one of its chairs.
But by the time she left the company about a year later, the committee, which was mostly made up of volunteers from the human resources department, hadn't done much beyond arranging a few meetings and posting job openings for DEI specialists.
"It was altruistic intentions, but there wasn't actually a figured-out formula as to how it would operate," she said.
Touré's experience is typical in the fashion industry, where many companies can show halting progress at best towards the ambitious goals they set in 2020 for everything from diversifying the executive ranks to increased representation in marketing to improving morale among minority employees.
Increasingly, the departments and staff tasked with meeting DEI goals are themselves the target. Some minority employees doubt their effectiveness, while executives question the link between investing in diversity and the bottom line. Meanwhile, conservative activists are looking to abolish DEI programmes via the courts.
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