2020 was a significant year for diversity, equity, and inclusion. As the global pandemic erupted, the inequalities against people of color grew. Women, especially of color, exited the workforce disproportionally, and that raised some fundamental questions on where we stand on diversity retention. While the politics on race and color is still going on, 2020 proved the merits of having a diverse team. Numerous studies have shown that the business case for diversity is strong, and such teams outperform their non-diverse counterparts. There are more than 200 studies that prove how imperative diversity is for businesses. It leads to greater profits, employee engagement, innovation, revenue turnover, and company growth. What’s more is that 90% of CEOs report diversity being their top priority, but unfortunately, the progress toward it has been slow.
Despite the recovering job market, the plight of the unemployed black and Latino women is the same. Black and Latina women were disproportionately laid off with reported jobless rates of 9.9% and 8.5%, respectively, in February 2021. Unfortunately, the employment for Black women is still 9.7%, although lower than it was in February 2020.
The people or demographics that are hit the hardest take the longest time to recover, which goes on to show that women of color will have to start from the bottom again. They were already climbing a ladder with broken rungs and the pandemic has taken away the progress they had so far. At this rate, women will not reach leadership equity with men until 2073. But when you look at underrepresented women in STEM, it has reached a crisis. The real question now is that women of color with degrees in STEM are here, but why aren’t they being represented? Even if they are hired, why don’t they end up in leadership positions? Why is their talent not identified?
It can easily be surmised that the problem isn’t with diversity anymore. Plenty of companies and CEOs understand its importance and realize that actions ought to be taken fast for their companies to grow and have equal representation. For years, the lack of diverse employees is justified by the supposed lack of resources or what we call the ‘pipeline problem’, but that’s not the case anymore. It is completely untrue and dismisses the effects of racism on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s careers. The issue isn’t diversity but is inclusion. The real problem is retaining diverse employees, especially underrepresented women of color in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although the number of women in computing professions has increased since 2017, so has the number of women who leave tech companies and careers. Pushing the numbers to reach the target is important, but the real challenge is to stabilize the workforce. There are more than 48,000 open vacancies for directors and vice-directors of DEI, which shows just how important it is for the companies to have an inclusive culture and to make their diverse talent stay.
In this paper, we aim to focus on how recruitment isn’t the real problem for diverse talent especially Black. Latinx and Indigenous women, but retention is. It intends to shed light on not just women being hired but going up the employee pipeline especially in lieu of the progress associated with the concurrent effects of the pandemic.
