Who cares about diversity, equity and inclusion?

Aaron Terrazas

November 29, 2022

Co-authored with Richard Johnson.

  • Access to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs expanded sharply across corporate America in 2020 and 2021, but progress stalled in 2022.
  • Companies in the Northeast and on the West Coast are more likely to offer Diversity Programs, but access has expanded across the United States.
  • A supermajority of employee reviewers view Diversity Programs as a “pro”, but a small minority view them as a “con”.
  • DE&I matters for the majority of employees and job seekers across age groups, but it matters more for younger employees, women, and people of color.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) made its way to the forefront of the corporate agenda across the United States after 2020’s tumultuous summer. Two years later – amid deepening angst about the economic outlook – progress has stalled. We analyzed Glassdoor and survey data to understand the economic geography of the companies and demographics of the employees who care most about DE&I.

Corporate investment in DE&I surged in 2020 and 2021, but stalled in 2022.

Corporate investment in DE&I programs – for instance Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), initiatives to ensure diverse candidate pools for open roles, reporting of company diversity statistics, and analysis of pay gaps – surged in 2020, and continued to expand in 2021 according to company benefit reviews on Glassdoor. This progress appears to be stalling: 41 percent of benefit reviews through 2022-Q3 indicated access to a diversity program, compared to 43 percent in 2021. Still, this is a sharp increase from the 29 percent that reported access in 2019. (Outside the United States, access has also expanded in the United Kingdom and Canada, though in Canada access continued to increase into 2022.)

Diversity Programs 2017-2022

Since 2019, nearly every major industry has seen an increase in the share of benefit reviews indicating that their employer offers a diversity program – with access increasing most between 2019 and 2022 in the Personal Consumer Services, Insurance, Media & Communication, and Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology sectors.

There was one exception to the trend: Government & Public Administration. In 2019, Government & Public Administration was the leader across industries for access to DE&I programs; by 2022, it was solidly middle of the pack. It was the only sector where access to DE&I programs declined from 2019 to 2022.

Diversity Programs by Industry

ERGs in particular have seen a boom over the past few years. References to ERGs in company reviews on Glassdoor are up more than six-fold since 2019, while references to diversity awareness training programs are up by 40 percent. References to generic/non-specific diversity programs are up nearly three-fold.

Companies in the Northeast and on the West Coast are more likely to offer Diversity Programs, but access has expanded across the United States.

Access to Diversity Programs expanded sharply across the United States between 2019 and 2021. In 2022, they have largely stagnated; in some areas, they have begun to decline. (1)

The chart below shows the share of companies where employees indicate that they have access to a Diversity Program in Glassdoor benefit reviews, by Census Division. (2) (Census Divisions are major geographic areas of the country created by the U.S. Census Bureau.)

  • In 2021, a majority of employee reviews across every Census Division said that they had access to a Diversity Program, but that is no longer the case in 2022.
  • The New England, Middle Atlantic, and the Pacific regions consistently show the most widespread access to Diversity Programs – with 60 percent or more of benefit reviews indicating access.
  • The East South Central, the West South Central, and Mountain Divisions generally have the lowest shares reporting access. In 2022, the share reporting access fell below the 50 percent threshold in the East South Central Division.
  • The largest decline from 2020 to 2022 was in the West North Central Division – which covers the upper Midwest.
Diversity Programs by Census Division

Among the top 25 metro areas (by the size of their labor force), Diversity Programs were most widespread in 2022 in metros that skew toward highly educated, professional workforces:

  • The top five large metros with the highest shares reporting access were Seattle, WA (73 percent); Las Vegas, NV (71 percent); San Francisco, CA (70 percent); Boston, MA (68 percent); and Charlotte, NC (66 percent).
  • The bottom five large metros with the lowest shares reporting access to a Diversity Program were Riverside, CA (33 percent); Sacramento, CA (34 percent); Tampa, FL (49 percent); San Diego, CA (50 percent), and Los Angeles, CA (51 percent).

Most large metro areas saw an increase in the share of companies providing access to a Diversity Program between 2019 and 2022, though three metros saw the share decline.

  • The largest increases were in Denver, CO (+31 percentage points); Las Vegas, NV (+27 percentage points); Boston, MA (+22 percentage points); Houston, TX (+21 percentage points); and Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL (+20 percentage points).
  • The three metros with a decrease were Jacksonville, FL (-10 percentage points); San Antonio, TX (-7 percentage points); and Sacramento, CA (-5 percentage points). The two metros with the smallest increases were Charlotte, NC (+1 percentage point) and San Diego, CA (+4 percentage points).
Diversity Programs by Metro

A supermajority of employee reviewers view Diversity Programs as a “pro”, but a small, stable minority view them as a “con.”

An overwhelming majority of employee reviewers on Glassdoor – between 61 percent and 72 percent over the past six years – view their company’s Diversity Program as a positive benefit (i.e., they list it as a “pro” of working at the company). A small, stable minority – between 15 percent and 21 percent – list it as a “con”.

Since 2019, the share of reviewers who list their company’s Diversity Program as a “pro” has increased slightly from 68 percent to 72 percent, a shift that mostly appears to be driven by a parallel decline in the share who view the benefit as “neutral”. In other words, modest gains in the share of employee reviewers who view Diversity Programs as a positive benefit has been due to more positive views among those who were previously ambivalent about these programs.

Diversity Programs - Pros vs Cons

DE&I matters for the majority of employees and job seekers across age groups, but it matters more for younger employees, women, and people of color.

At the individual level, the employees who say they care most about DE&I tend to skew younger, non-white (especially Black), and female, according to a Glassdoor analysis of a September 2022 survey commissioned by Glassdoor and conducted by The Harris Poll among nearly 2,700 U.S. workers and/or job seekers.

Among employees and job seekers aged 18-34, 80 percent say that a company’s investment in diversity, equity and inclusion is very or somewhat important to them when they are considering a new job, a statistically significant difference from employees and job seekers age 55-64 (67 percent), and from employees and job seekers age 65-plus (61 percent). It is also statistically larger than the 74 percent of employees and job seekers aged 35-54 who say it is very or somewhat important to them.

Broken out by gender, women are more likely than men to say it is important. By race/ethnicity, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) employees and job seekers are more likely than white employees and job seekers to say it is very or somewhat important to them.

How important is DE&I?

Simply comparing differences across age groups might be misleading since younger employees are also more racially/ethnically diverse than older employees, and that might explain the difference across age groups. Indeed, looking at the gender gap by generation, we find that the gaps are largest for older workers and smallest for younger workers.

  • Among employees and job seekers, men are less likely than women (72 percent versus 76 percent) to say that corporate investment in DEI is “very” or “somewhat” important to them when considering a new job. However, this result is driven entirely by Baby Boomer and Generation X men: Millennial men are no different from Millennial women in how important DE&I is to them when considering a new job. (3)
    • Among Baby Boomers, 70 percent of women say DE&I is very or somewhat important to them when considering a new job versus 56 percent of men.
    • Among Generation X, 76 percent of women say DE&I is very or somewhat important to them when considering a new job versus 69 percent of men.
    • Among Millennials, 79 percent of both men and women say DE&I is very or somewhat important to them when considering a new job. (Not statistically different.)
    • Among Generation Z, 76 percent of women say DE&I is very or somewhat important to them when considering a new job versus 77 percent of men. (Not statistically different.)
How important is DE&I?

Disaggregating the results by generation and race/ethnicity, shows somewhat diverging trends between Black employees, and white and Hispanic employees.

  • Black employees overall are more likely to say that corporate investment in DEI is “very” or “somewhat” important to them when considering a new job, with older Black employees having the highest share (84 percent) who said that DE&I was very or somewhat important to them.
  • Younger (Generation Z and Millennial) Black employees are somewhat less likely to say so than older (Generation X and Baby Boomer) Black employees – 77 percent versus 84 percent.
  • There is the opposite of the increasing generational trend among white employees (77 percent among younger white employees versus 67 percent among older white employees) and Hispanic employees (82 percent among younger Hispanic employees versus 69 percent among older Hispanic employees).
How important is DE&I?

Conclusion

Moving into the post-pandemic era, we’re seeing that corporate leadership is less and less about top-down decisions and more about stakeholder buy-in. Today’s business executives must navigate an increasingly tenuous trinity of stakeholders: Investors, Customers, and Employees. The order of priority varies with economic conditions and by corporate structure. Employee concerns naturally rise higher on the agenda during tight labor markets as we have had for much of the past two years.

With worker resignations falling and hiring conditions easing, DE&I initiatives have come under scrutiny from some investors and advocates who view them as a distraction from a narrower set of business performance metrics. Proponents of these programs tend to counter that (1) a diverse workforce is something that employees – particularly future employees – value, and/or (2) a diverse workforce leads to more robust business outcomes.

Empirically assessing (2) is beyond the scope of this analysis. (Our reading of the existing literature – for instance here, here, here and here – is that it does.) However, the data presented above support the notion that DE&I is important to younger workers who will compose a larger and larger segment of the U.S. workforce in the years ahead, that these programs are increasingly widespread across the United States despite continued gaps, and overwhelming shares of employees view these initiatives in a positive light.

Methodology

To assess corporate investment in DE&I programs nationally, we analyzed Glassdoor benefit reviews and took the median share of users across all industries indicating access to an employer-sponsored diversity program from January 2017 through September 2022. For the industry and geospatial analysis, we conducted the analysis at the employer-geography level, taking the share of companies within a Census Division or metro area where any employees indicated that they had access to an employer-sponsored diversity program. We excluded firms where there was only one benefit review in a given Census Division.

To capture employee-sentiment towards diversity programs over the same period, we analyzed employee reviews and group mentions of diversity program related terms and phrases such as, “DE&I Program”, “bias training”, “anti-racist training” and “employee resource groups” as positive if it appears in the “pros” section of a review and negative if it appears in the “cons” section. Reviews where one of these terms and phrases was mentioned, but was not categorized as a positive or negative characteristic of working at a company, were categorized as neutral.

To assess the importance of corporate investment in DE&I to employees and job seekers when considering a new role, a survey commissioned by Glassdoor and conducted by The Harris Poll was conducted online within the United States from August 30 - September 1 and September 6 - 8, 2022, among 4,049 adults ages 18+, of whom 2,688 were either currently employed or not employed but actively seeking work. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the sample data is accurate to within +/- 2.8 percentage points using a 95% confidence level.

Footnotes

(1) 2022 data covers the first three quarters of the year only.

(2) New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Middle Atlantic: New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Pacific: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. East South Central: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Mountain: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. West South Central: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

(3) Baby Boomers include respondents born between 1945 and 1964, Generation X includes those born between 1965 and 1980, Millennials include those born between 1981 and 1996, and Generation Z includes those born in 1997 or later.

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