Push is set for workplace diversity

The Boston Globe
By John C. Drake
Globe Staff / May 19, 2008

Massachusetts civic leaders and business executives are preparing a major push to improve the diversity of the state's workforce by keeping closer track of the numbers of minority and female employees.
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The new push comes less than a year after a detailed survey showed that the state's largest businesses and nonprofit institutions are led almost exclusively by white men.
Leaders of the effort, including former Suffolk district attorney Ralph C. Martin II and Steve Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, say the state's institutions need to take public action to improve diversity and counter a perception, lingering since the busing controversy of the 1970s, that Massachusetts has a hostile racial climate.
"We have a branding problem in Boston, but we also have a real problem in Boston," Crosby said.
Seventy-six institutions, from Wal-Mart to Bunker Hill Community College, have already signed on to the program - called the Commonwealth Compact - in advance of a public appeal set for Friday, when Governor Deval Patrick and Mayor Thomas M. Menino will back the effort. By joining the program, employers will be asked to make several commitments that will give the public some new insights into the diversity of the private workforce, organizers said.
Employers will agree to supply demographic data on their workforce, executive team, and applicant pool to a central database and commit to taking steps to improve their diversity. The Commonwealth Compact will, in turn, report to the public on the diversity of the state's workforce, categorized by the type of business or institution.
The public reports will not include details on each company's workforce, which one diversity specialist said weakened the initiative's potential impact. But Martin said the program is focused on "collective accountability," and won't point the finger at individual employers.
"There's an old saying, 'That which gets measured, gets done,' " said Martin, a managing partner of Bingham McCutchen, a law firm that is one of the early signers of the compact. "We're going to throw our lot in with each other and represent in a very transparent way whether or not our industries are making progress." [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/05/19/push_is_set_for_workplace_diversity/?page=full ]