Thirty-seven of the nation’s biggest companies gave Bloomberg data on the racial compositions of their “management,” “professional,” and “other” workers. The resulting piece is headlined “New Data Expose Precisely How White and Male Some U.S. Companies Are.”
The more striking results concern Asians.
In professional roles, whites are actually underrepresented at most of these companies: 20, by my count. Even in management roles, they’re underrepresented at seven. Asians, by contrast, are underrepresented in just three companies for management roles and in no companies for professional roles. Asians are just 5.8 percent of the American population, but at eleven of these companies they make up more than a quarter of the managers and a quarter of the professionals.
Many corporations are now facing the same problem bedeviling elite colleges: They want to create a population that “looks like America,” but they can no longer achieve that by taking slots away from whites and giving them to blacks and Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics are still underrepresented, but now it’s Asians who are overrepresented.