“Women have shown great courage and sacrifice on and off the battlefield, contributed in unprecedented ways to the military’s mission and proven their ability to serve in an expanding number of roles,” says Panetta. “The department’s goal in rescinding the rule is to ensure that the mission is met with the best-qualified and most capable people, regardless of gender.”

Panetta: Diversity Champion

DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti, a veteran, interviewed Panetta in 2010 on his desire for a more inclusive federal workplace, including the military. “Our mission is to gather intelligence throughout the world. …You can’t get good intelligence without understanding the world that we’re in, without reflecting the ethnic background of the world [and] relating to the nations that we’re involved in,” said Panetta during the interview, in which he discussed his experiences as a civil-rights champion and public servant. “The most fulfilling thing you can do in life is make a difference.”

“This was a good move, about eight years overdue. [The ban has] been holding down the careers of women who served in combat, but many officially have been in combat-support roles for the past 10 years. It shouldn’t have taken this long for policy to reflect reality,” says Visconti. Visconti served as a Naval aviator and commissioned officer with the U.S. Navy from 1982 to 1990, and he now serves on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Committee, where he has co-chaired three subcommittees regarding diversity and women’s issues, reporting out to the Chief of Naval Operations. Visconti also was a driving force in pressing now-retired Admiral Michael Mullen to revise the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which was repealed in 2010.

Women & Diversity in the Military

Military branches will have until January 2016 to implement the changes or to request special exemptions if they believe certain positions should remain under the ban. Congress will also have 30 days to consider the policy change. Front-line jobs could begin opening to women later this year.

“Today, by moving to open more military positions—including ground-combat units—to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens,” President Obama said, giving his endorsement. “This milestone reflects the courageous and patriotic service of women through more than two centuries of American history and the indispensable role of women in today’s military. Many have made the ultimate sacrifice, including more than 150 women who have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan—patriots whose sacrifices show that valor knows no gender.” 

Women currently make up 14 percent of the country’s 1.4 million active military personnel. Although women were not allowed to serve in combat officially, military women frequently had to engage in combat throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which blurred the roles of combat and non-combat personnel. More than 800 women were wounded, in addition to the more than 150 who were killed.

The decision is one of the last acts that Panetta will implement as Defense Secretary. Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel to assume the position for his second presidential term. Hagel is a former senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam veteran.

Panetta is a veteran who served as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He attended Intelligence School and was Chief of Operations and Planning for Intelligence at Fort Ord prior to starting his political career. Panetta served as a legislative assistant, then Special Assistant to Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert Finch, and was Director of the U.S. Office for Civil Rights where he worked to enforce equal-education laws during the Nixon Administration.

The post Finally! Ban on Women in Combat Lifted appeared first on DiversityInc.

Showing real diversity leadership, President Obama today announced his support for same-sex marriage. His decision, applauded immediately by supporters of diversity and inclusion, came after pressure from the LGBT community and DiversityInc, among others.

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

His announcement comes a day after the voters in North Carolina overwhelmingly voted to ban same-sex marriage and prohibit local governments from offering domestic-partner benefits.

The lesson is one several CEOs have learned. Vice President Joe Biden took a visible stand on Sunday, when he announced on “Meet the Press,” a Sunday-morning TV talk show, his adamant support for same-sex marriage. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan very publicly added his adamant support.

Obama said he has supported other LGBT rights, including the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” after long deliberations. Read Ask the White Guy: What Changed Obama’s Mind About Gay Rights?

Several states are considering same-sex-marriage legislation, both positive and negative. The recent events include the California court decision to strike down the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage that DiversityInc covered earlier this year. Minnesota faces a ban on same-sex marriages in November while Maine residents are being asked to approve marriage equality.

Fifty percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, according to the latest Gallup poll. By comparison, a 2000 Harris poll showed that only 15 percent of Americans at that time approved same-sex marriage. That may not be a comfortable-enough margin for Obama, but it’s a telling indicator that public conviction is changing.

Equality for LGBT people is not a bargaining chip but a fundamental civil right, as noted in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s President Joe Solmonese’s official statement. And real leaders must unequivocally support ALL human rights. This lesson has been demonstrated in corporate America several times by diversity-management leaders, especially CEOs. Click on the images to download a PDF of our Diversity Leadership LGBT Pride Timeline and Facts & Figures.

Corporate Diversity-Leadership Lessons

There are several positive examples of CEOs and corporate leaders who have stood up for LGBT rights with great success. 

• Most recently, jcpenney CEO Ron Johnson very publicly supported the company’s decision to use Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson, despite boycott threats from a bogus organization called One Million Moms, which was really an offshoot of the anti-gay group Focus on the Family. Johnson cited DeGeneres’ strong values as a reason for choosing her. Jcpenney is No. 35 in The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity.

• Last year, several DiversityInc Top 50 companies, including KPMG (No. 22) and AT&T (No. 4), publicly denounced a Tennessee bill prohibiting local governments from passing antidiscrimination measures. The companies were embarrassed after the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, of which they are members, supported the bills. Other companies joining in the protest of the bill, which passed, included Pfizer, Comcast and Whirlpool (all three are on DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies list).
  
• In Indiana, DiversityInc Top 50 companies such as WellPoint (No. 34), Eli Lilly and Company (No. 29) and Cummins (No. 18) have been fighting the Defense of Marriage Act (which also narrowly defines marriage as only for heterosexual couples). Nationally, according to the Human Rights Campaign, several diversity-management leaders have opposed the Defense of Marriage Act legislation, including Aetna (No. 24), The Chubb Corporation, National Grid, Time Warner Cable and Xerox (Time Warner Cable and Xerox are two of DiversityInc’s 25 Noteworthy Companies).
  
• Many DiversityInc Top 50 companies have been strong advocates for the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This includes Ernst & Young (No. 6), Accenture (No. 12), Merck & Co. (No. 16), IBM (No. 17), KPMG (No. 22), Dell (No. 26), Eli Lilly and Company, Bank of America (No. 31), WellPoint, Time Warner (No. 40), The Coca-Cola Company (No. 46) and Capital One (No. 47).
  
• Companies including Cisco and PG&E have publicly opposed Proposition 8 in California, and companies including The McGraw-Hill Companies urged the passage of same-sex marriage in New York.
  
• Companies including Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (No. 1) recently announced that they will offset the tax penalties employees pay for having same-sex domestic-partner health benefits.

In the cases of all of these companies, their CEOs stood firmly and visibly behind their decisions to stand up for equality for everyone. Many of these CEOs have told DiversityInc in interviews why they are visible supporters of rights for everyone, including Bob McDonald of Procter & Gamble (No. 5), John Veihmeyer of KPMG, John Stumpf of Wells Fargo (No. 33), Ernst & Young’s Jim Turley, and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Bob Moritz.

Read What Clinton’s Global LGBT-Rights Speech Means for Your Company.

Vacuum in Diversity Leadership

In the absence of real diversity leadership, those who oppose equality win. There are several companies, including Walmart, whose leaders have to this point been reluctant to advocate for equal treatment of employees, including domestic-partner health benefits for same-sex partners of employees.

The absence of this equality costs companies support in the community from LGBT people, from their friends and allies, and increasingly from younger people, according to several polls from Gallup and other organizations. Read Civil-Rights Progress: Helping LGBT Youth for more information.

It also costs companies a spot on the DiversityInc Top 50 list (a policy that’s been in place for the past four years). This year, when the HRC increased its qualifications for the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), including more provisions for transgender people, we added scoring penalties in the DiversityInc Top 50 for companies that received less than an 80 percent on the CEI. Read Our Analysis of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

The momentum is shifting quickly toward marriage equality, despite the backlash factor remaining in states such as North Carolina. Diversity leadership means taking a public stand. Thank you, President Obama.

Read Ask the White Guy: Decision Making, Clarity of Values & What to Do When It Goes Horribly Wrong for more on the importance of communicating diversity-leadership values

–Barbara Frankel

The post President Obama Supports Marriage Equality appeared first on DiversityInc.

The White Guy responds to a reader’s question of whether Sen. Barack Obama is facing opposition simply because he is a Black man.

Question:
If Obama were a white man with the same ideas for economics, healthcare, the wars, energy AND the message of unity going against McCain, do you think this campaign would be such a big deal? I personally think that for those who so strongly oppose him, it merely comes down to the fact that he’s a Black man. They hide behind the “issues” but when it all comes down to it, I think that many who so strongly oppose him do so solely based on the color of his skin. What do you think? Keep up the good work.

Answer:
Thank you.
 
Every poll I’ve seen shows that there is a certain segment of the American population that will not vote for Senator Obama simply because he’s Black. What seems to have changed, however, is that those people don’t hide their feelings anymore.
 
According to the Pew Research Center, the so-called Wilder effect, where white people say one thing to pollsters and do another in the voting booth, seems to have gone away.

However, I think there’s another very important point: I’m not sure Senator Obama would have made it this far if he weren’t Black. It’s my observation that the everyday racism that hurts the majority of oppressed people by destroying ego, self-esteem and by putting one too many unfair race-based obstacles in a career path, galvanizes a small percentage of especially strong people.
 
To head off the usual “I had obstacles too” e-mails from white people, let me add that the injustice of racism (or sexism, or discrimination against people with visible disabilities, etc.) is in ADDITION to the regular obstacles that we all face. Not only is it additional, but it is focused on a facet of being that is out of our control–we are born the way we are (or may become that way in the case of a disability). That feeling of out-of-your-control, yet personally directed injustice cannot be fully understood by majority men who are heterosexual and have no ADA-defined disabilities.
 
Would Senator Obama have risen to go to Columbia and Harvard Law School–where he eventually became the president of the Harvard Law Review–if he were not strengthened by living every day in the crucible of being a Black man in America? Would he have had the empathy to work as a civil-rights lawyer and community organizer? Would he have had the gumption to successfully run for the state Senate twice and then the United States Senate? Could he have run a campaign that defied all media predictions, raised unprecedented money from an unprecedented number of people and derailed the anointed party candidate with the strongest brand name in politics?
 
I don’t think so.
 
If Barack Obama had been born a white man in a comfortable, middle-class household, I think he’d be successful, but I don’t think it’s likely we’d know who he is.
 
I will add that the same goes for Sen. McCain. Yes, he had the advantage of having a father and grandfather who were admirals who had influence in his acceptance into the Naval Academy. But plenty of people go to the Naval Academy–and there were over 1,000 POWs in Vietnam. Why did he resist his captor’s torture with such integrity? Why did he continue his career in the Navy after he was released? Why did he run for Senate? Why was his response to the debate question about torture so unequivocal and firm? Why do we know so much about this one senator out of 100? Sen. McCain has grit, character, intelligence and almost superhuman perseverance. There are no polls that indicate his support is in any significant way due to anti-Black sentiments–and I don’t think it would be fair to imply so.
 
There are significant differences in the philosophies of both candidates.

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