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by George Leard

Created on: March 19, 2010

Does diversity in the workplace ensure work place equality?

It will take several generations, before diversity will be able to bring a level of equality to the workplaces, due to several underlying reasons.

Diversity should be seen by leaders, as an asset in the process of organizational development; where the best candidates are recruited, regardless of their race, gender, physical disabilities, geographic locations, ethnic origins, value systems or cultural orientations. However due to the long history of racial discrimination, gender bias, and strong oppositions to change, equality will not come to the USA, Japan, or any other countries that has institutionalize this practice.

The national demographic of a country, should be used as the basis to establish diversity in the workplace; meaning the same ratio of each group on a national scale should be represented in all workplaces.

This can only be achieved, when the colleges, universities, and other training institutions, adopt the same strategy and enforce it, so that employers can have the available candidates to recruit from. However, this would require concerted efforts to achieve, in order to bring equality to the workplace. The souls of nations have been eaten out by discriminatory employment practices, and attaining equality will bring about a measure of healing, but true honesty, and ethicality have been covered by layers of greed, dishonesty, and insecurities.

Many organizations are unwilling to change, because there are no laws that are effective enough to penalize them, and they can simply say that they are Equal Employment Opportunity compliant, but when the demographics of their workforces are analyzed, they invariable are always skewed towards homogeneity. In their defense, they will simply say that they cannot find the females, Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, or physically disabled persons to recruit, and there will be no evidence to proof that they are lying, thereby reducing the change of bringing equity to the workplace.

According to www.ethnicmajority.c om, most Americans would agree that cultural diversity in the workplace utilize our countries skills to the fullest extent, and contribute to our overall growth and prosperity. The reality of the situation is, that it is not happened, and progress remains very slow.

Equality will start to make serious progress among the rank and file, and among managers and supervisors, when the diversity begins to happen in the board rooms, among senior managers, at ethnic American cultural events, and in charitable ethnic American organizations. The impact of leadership at this level, will then lead to serious downward influence on managers and supervisors, thereby leading to increase in the levels of equality.

 The Federal Government would have been the ideal place to see diversity at work impacting the nation, but for the past decade, it has not happened. It presently employs 2.7 million workers, but the participation of blacks over the period has decreased, the rates for women, Hispanics, and Asians has only slightly increased, and the number of disabilities continues to decline, and remain below 1% of the workforce.

A particular concern, which shows that diversity is not bringing equality to the workplace among civil servants, is that of Latinos, which is the fastest growing racial group in the country, but only make up 7.9% of the federal workforce.

However there are companies like AETNA, Sony, and AT&T that are setting industrial benchmarks that others could emulate, and bring equality to the workplaces in more significant ways, through the use of diversity. Sony for the last five years has a 38.8% female employment ratio throughout its US facilities, with 32.8% of these women occupying managerial positions.

In Japan which is a male dominated society, Sony female employment stood at 26.8%, with 3.1% of those holding managerial positions according to www.ilr.cornell.edu/ library/research

AT&T since 1968 has instituted Suppliers Diversity Programs, Minorities Business Enterprises, Women Business Enterprise (1980), and Disabled Veterans Business Enterprises (1983), in an effort to involve diversity in all aspects of its operations, and to ensure customer satisfaction.

However AETNA has blazed a trail in diversity in the workplace to ensure equity that is not easily matched. In the five year period (2003-2008), it has employed 35,200 employees, with 32% of that total being people of color, and 15% of this amount of African Americans hold supervisory or managerial positions.

Presently, 76% of their workforces are women, and 62% of those women hold managerial and or supervisory positions, and at the senior level they occupy a significant 30%.

These  outstanding performances shows, that with some effort, and a level of honesty and responsibility, diversity can bring equality to the workplace in the near future, but for the present it is not happening, and is a strong indictment on the industry leaders, who are willing to sacrifice the future, by maintaining the outdated traditions of the past.

Sources

www.ilr.cornell.edu

US Department of Labor

www.ethnicmajority.c om

www.diversityinc.com /department

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