When the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a global racial reckoning in 2020, companies and individuals alike rallied at an unprecedented scale to pledge their commitment to advancing racial justice.realm, the Estée Lauder Cos.
Even Coty Inc. at the time had only one female board member and one woman on its executive committee. Just ask E.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin, who has now led the company through multiple consecutive quarters of net sales growth, including most recently the acquisition of Naturium for $355 million in August. “Our employee base is a competitive advantage,” he said
Yet data from Edge shows that despite comprising a median 69 percent of the personal care industry’s total workforce, women make up just 36 percent of the top management level. Results of a spring 2023 survey taken by 4,000 personal care industry employees indicate that age, race/ethnicity, and disability — in that order — are perceived to be the top factors inhibiting a person’s likelihood of getting hired in the industry.
Founded in 2020, the Women on Boards Project is one organization aiming to boost diverse board representation, having placed 50 women on boards of consumer goods companies including The Honey Pot Co., Simple Mills and feminine care brand, Lola. In all, seven of beauty’s 20 biggest companies shared with Beauty Inc the number of women of color on their boards and executive committees. Those boards have a mean average 21 percent women of color representation, and within their executive committees, a mean average 10 percent women of color representation. .
The Estée Lauder Cos. will reveal in its Social Impact & Sustainability Report set to be released next month that the company met its In what appeared to be an effort to accomplish that, a plethora of chief diversity officer roles were created in 2020 — only for many to have already been eliminated in the time since, while others have struggled to retain occupancy.
“We saw a lot of companies who made commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion in 2020 made minimal investments, and then became frustrated when their employees, shareholders and the public held them to account,” said Joelle Emerson, cofounder and CEO of diversity, equity and inclusion training platform Paradigm IQ. “Diversity, equity and inclusion can’t be performative — it needs to be a priority to be successful.
“Those companies who were never truly convinced of the business value of diversity, equity and inclusion, who engaged in it only because they felt the social pressure to — they are the most likely to discontinue their efforts after the Supreme Court decision,” said Unguresan.