10 Most Diverse Companies In The US

Diversity is a hot topic in the US corporate world, and the 10 most diverse companies in the US are showing the way in terms of how a workplace and its management team can be more inclusive to people of all races and genders.

There are a number of organizations and groups assessing the state of diversity at major companies. One of these organizations is DiversityInc, which is in its 17^th year of conducting surveys across hundreds of companies to evaluate workplace conditions. For the latest survey, conducted in 2016, the organization looked at 1,800 companies across 15 industries, and applied a metrics-driven evaluation to each. The survey correlates each company’s best practices, such as diversity councils, resource groups and mentoring, and senior-executive accountability, with human-capital and supplier-diversity specifics, to study how successful a company’s push for diversity has become.

There are also a number of organizations assessing each company’s social responsibility practices, and you can see the top performers for that field in Insider Monkey’s article of the 10 Most Socially Responsible Companies in the US.

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All this attention on workplace diversity goes beyond societal issues, workplace ethics, and the push for equality. According to a number of studies, diversity is also correlated to better bottom-lines and performance for companies. A study conducted by Thomson Reuters across more than 4,000 companies traded globally showed that companies with greater gender diversity on their boards generally have less volatile stock prices and showed similar or better gains in stock price.

Another study, this time by McKinsey, found that for companies in the Americas and the United Kingdom, a more gender-diverse company is 15% more likely to outperform a less gender-diverse company, while a more ethnically-diverse company is 35% more likely to outperform a less ethnically-diverse company. In addition, a 10% increase in racial diversity for management teams of US companies translates to a 0.8% rise in earnings.

These studies present us with compelling evidence as to why we need to strive to improve diversity and equality in the corporate world. Despite certain companies’ best efforts to be more inclusive, women account for an average of just 16% of the members of executive teams in the US, while 97% of US companies fail to reflect the demographic composition of the country’s labor force and population.

Nevertheless, from these studies, we can infer that workplace and management diversity can be seen as a good sign for a company, because it can predict better performance. As to whether those findings on the recent studies hold water for the companies assessed by DiversityInc as the most diverse; well, we’ll look into that in this list of the 10 Most Diverse Companies In The US, continued on the next page.