How are major companies solving the inequities that cause retention and promotion gaps for underrepresented groups? More than 150 chief diversity officers and senior executives from more than 75 companies attended our November 2010 event in Washington, D.C., discussing this and other questions on diversity management in our roundtable sessions. Thoughtful and focused discussions facilitated by professors from The PhD Project led to idea sharing and recommendations for action plans.

Read the specific actions that these executives are taking.

What are the greatest obstacles to equality in corporate America (and America) today?

Emilio Egea, chief diversity officer, Prudential Financial: Bias has gone from being very overt to being more implicit, an unconscious incompetence. I don’t think it’s necessarily malevolent, but people have these biases and they don’t recognize how they’re impacting their workplace decisions.

Billie Williamson, Americas inclusiveness officer, Ernst & Young: There is a broader issue of unintended bias. People don’t mean to be biased but they are because of the way they grew up and the different experiences they have had. There are built-in things in the mind that don’t allow us to treat people decently.

Alicia Petross, senior group manager, diversity, Target Corp.: The biggest challenge that we face as diversity leaders, and I think it’s human nature, is dealing with how people naturally behave, how the brain functions, how the brain resists change. We are trying to take individuals with 30, 40, 50, 60 years of experience and bias and beliefs, and shift them to a different place than they experience on a day-to-day basis, and that is a huge undertaking. That’s why this becomes the evolution or the journey, and this doesn’t happen overnight. You’re trying to impact corporate culture, and then you’re trying to impact individual beliefs and behaviors.

Jimmie Paschall, senior vice president, external affairs, and global diversity officer, Marriott International: Taylor Branch called it intimate separation. It’s a concept that you can work with people for years and not really know them because individuals don’t render themselves vulnerable to each other.

Bob Chauvin, president, SimplexGrinnell, a Tyco International company: There is a perception that people don’t have the ability to aspire or achieve certain career aspirations. [People think] they don’t care, they’re not interested and, therefore, we shouldn’t spend our time with them.

Tara Amaral, chief diversity officer and vice president of talent acquisition, ADP: We’re not particularly good at making sure that everyone understands the different channels that they could leverage to find out about opportunities, project work, how we do a better job of connecting people so that they can manage their own career. 

Tracey Gray-Walker, senior vice president and chief diversity officer, AXA Equitable: Unequal access. There are leaders who believe that people should be able to be successful in environments but those people don’t necessarily have the same access to the decision makers or the people who are actually creating the opportunities.

Lorie Valle-Yañez, vice president, chief diversity officer, MassMutual: There is often a lack of access in an organization to prevent people from even having a conversation. The people at the top tend to be more homogeneous and are not even having the benefit of the dialogue of diversity of thought. In some organizations, there’s a cultural taboo of even having conversations up and down the chain.

Jim Norman, vice president of diversity, Kraft Foods: One of the greatest obstacles is a scarcity of resources in corporations, a scarcity of time, a scarcity for positions, a scarcity of access to the top jobs. Whenever you have that, you’re going to have this human nature play out in a certain way—about controlling access, limiting access, giving time.

How involved should corporations be in changing public policy/social inequities?

Tracey Gray-Walker: They should be very involved because companies have the opportunity to actually change and influence communities from a policy standpoint.

Joe Husman, national manager, inclusion and diversity, Toyota Financial Services: It used to be the federal government that led the workplace progress for many different groups. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. If the federal government is not going to be the place that is the benchmark on leading, on equality for people, then maybe it should be corporations.

Lorie Valle-Yañez: We’re sitting in Springfield, Mass. And it is absolutely a responsibility to help people through supporting education. Eventually, you hope these folks will become customers. It’s really in companies’ self-interest to be involved.

Jim Norman: Companies are a little bit more challenged when it comes to public policy because, at least in the United States, that may be contrary to their corporate best interests. The public policy for a society typically sits on the Democratic side of the House, on the left. The things that benefit organizations typically sit on the right.

Susan Hamilton, assistant vice president, diversity/human resources, CSX Corp.: If corporations are not involved in public life, the communities will stagnate and they will not accept change. The companies have to lead the way—meaning company leaders have to be involved in organizations and community.

William Lee, director, corporate diversity, inclusion and compliance at Abbott: It’s important for companies to be involved from a public standpoint because of their future workforces [and] the needs they have. What you need to do is go into the communities that need it the most and develop those folks to be future employees for you.

Deborah Dagit, vice president and chief diversity officer, Merck & Co.: If you’ve done diversity work in the government and nonprofit sectors, it becomes apparent that—whether it’s good, or right, or not—the likelihood that you can effect change on a global basis is greater in the corporate world. It’s just a bigger microphone. There are more funds, and people are more likely to listen and replicate.

Ronke Ekwensi, vice president, Pfizer: When an organization can see a synergistic need between their survival and your welfare, then what that organization will do is step up to ensure your welfare is met. I came from a public accounting firm, and … one of the reasons why public accounting firms are so far ahead in the diversity agenda is that they recognized that if they were not diverse, the economics of their business was going to change because their customers were changing. So they had to step up to the plate, as opposed to a widget-making company where there is a product on the shelf and maybe or maybe not you’re not getting that same kind of economic pressure. To the extent that you can align both, then you see corporations or organizations taking that proactive step to make a difference.