My whole life I've been a team player, so I was excited to be a part of something new and to learn.
Unfortunately, I was not invested in the same way that my white employees were, but it's just kind of interesting to see how
things played out and who got the most out of this summer.
I can assure you, it's not the Black people who spoke up about it.
You can put that in there. Just that.
Black employment in America is in a state of crisis.
According to Citi, failure to address racial gaps between Black and white Americans has cost the U.S.
economy up to $16 trillion over the past 20 years.
The Black wage gap alone accounts for $2.7 trillion of that.
And while companies work to rectify these inequities, real-time data shows the gravity of the problem.
Black women and Black men are paid 63 cents and 71 cents, respectively, for every dollar paid to
white men. And research shows that over a 40-year career, Black women are slated to lose
$946,000 due to the pay gap.
The gap is even more severe for Native American women and Latinas, and the pay disparity only worsens
as education level increases.
Black female doctorate degree holders are slated to lose a staggering $1.9 million over a
40-year career. Take Ryan Walker-Hartshorn, a third-generation Stanford
graduate with big dreams.
Ryan first made headlines in June of 2012, but her story starts much earlier.
I was a collegiate athlete, had a career-ending injury, so I didn't really have a plan.
I was very interested in writing in media.
And so, you know, I really needed an entry-level job just to get some experience working.
Soon after, she found a dream opportunity to work as an assistant to Adam Rapoport, the Editor-in-Chief of Bon
Appétit magazine.
I got what I felt was like a dream position for me to be where I had a large media company like Vogue, Teen
Vogue, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, just like seemed like endless possibilities for me.
While Ryan had her sights set on a future at Condé Nast, she also had to face an unsettling reality.
The first interview I went into, they brought me to the floor and I was just like, "This is white, but cool.
Nothing I have not seen.
I went to Stanford and all white schools my whole life so I can handle this."
Ryan says her offer was roughly $35,000 a year with an opportunity to make up to $50,000 with over
time.
So that was a sell for me because I was like, "Hell yeah, I'm out of college.
I'll make a lot of money and over time, and I'll be able to make ends meet.
And that's what people do in New York City."
While Ryan's salary was low, she was still motivated by an opportunity to produce diverse content at an established
brand. So in 2018, she pitched a story centered on Black-owned restaurants in her
hometown of Oakland, California, for Bon Appétit's series Big Fat Weekend.
The article did so well, she was asked to write another one, this time in Washington, D.C.
Ryan says she received pushback when requesting pay for overtime hours on several occasions, including for the D.C.
story.
And after all of that, my editor told me that she had never experienced that type of pushback or had to ever
fight so hard for a budget.
There's so many hours that we haven't filed because it was just like too much for us to go through.
Ryan also says she struggled to receive a promotion at Bon Appétit after nearly three years while her two predecessors
moved up in the brand after an average of two and a half years on the job.
Both former assistants are white.
With the growing collection of writing samples, Ryan expected to follow their trajectory, but said she was lacking one important
ingredient: support from her boss.
After my article had performed well, I was like, "This is a great opportunity for me to bring it up to my boss about
taking on maybe more responsibility and storytelling." And then in this meeting with my boss, I was told that those
contributions were like bare minimum and what was expected of me and I wasn't doing anything extraordinary out of my job
description and that like, basically, no.
Ryan's struggle to move up within her company is not unique.
So I have not ever been promoted when I was in a company.
I have held senior recruiter, senior sourcer positions, not because I got promoted from
already being the job. That was because that specific company and recruiter reached out to me based on my background.
I do know that a couple of my counterparts that were not reflective of my demographics specifically were promoted
internally, whether they were therefore shorter than I was or maybe a little bit longer.
But they were promoted and I was never, ever reached out to about potentially being evaluated for
promotion.
According to McKinsey, Black employees are 23% less likely to feel like they have a lot of support at their
company. Further, Black employees are 41% less likely to feel promotions are fair.
I think the reason why there is a challenge for underrepresented professionals to be promoted into
higher positions, it goes back to the fact that they're not reflective at those leadership and
managerial levels, especially within tech.
Now, I can't speak for other industries specifically.
Today, Black professionals in the U.S.
private sector make up 12% of the entry level workforce and just 7% of the managerial workforce.
When looking at the senior manager, VP and SVP level, that number drops to 4% and
5%. At Fortune 500 firms specifically, less than 1% of CEOs
are Black. In 2019, Harvard Business Review reported that managers promote
employees they personally identify with, creating another ceiling for underrepresented employees of color.
Black workers, on average, are not being hired, promoted or paid according to their
level of productivity based on their experience or their education.
Even if these discriminatory patterns are not, quote unquote, intentional, people's networks,
the folks that you know, the schools that you go to recruit from, all factor into who gets an
opportunity to be employed.
For employees like Ryan, the Covid-19 pandemic was the tipping point.
One of the things that we've heard about over a long period of time is that African-Americans are the last hired and the first
fired. And it's something that actually this year during the pandemic, we saw that initially a lot of African-Americans lost
their jobs in the natural economy, has been recovering slowly, that they have been getting their jobs at a later rate than
others.
Ryan was able to keep her job at Bon Appétit when the pandemic hit, but she still found herself at a loss.
While Condé Nast cut overtime hours across the company, Ryan says she was hit especially hard because of her low
salary.
I was able to get a little bit to make ends meet, but then I started to get behind on my rent, actually, and then protesting
happened. I think that really set me off.
Ryan started filing complaints about her boss as early as 2019.
She even told HR about an incident where she says Rapoport asks her to make his coffee the color of Rihanna.
But following the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, Ryan went public with her challenges.
And she wasn't the only Bon Appétit employee to air her grievances.
But things escalated when a racially insensitive photo of Rapoport and his wife was posted on Twitter by food writer
Tammie Teclemariam.
The 2004 photo was originally posted on Instagram by Rapaport's wife.
It has since been deleted.
On June 9th, one day after Teclemariam's tweet, Adam Rapoport, BonAppétit's Editor-in-Chief of 10
years, stepped down.
I think all of that really enraged a lot of people, and it happened during the summer, which was very tumultuous for a lot
of reasons. That's kind of, I think, what led to their stepping down.
However, the events that followed really disappointed me.
Things did not get better for Ryan at Condé Nast.
The company reportedly offered her an interim editorial assistant position in an effort to get her to stay.
It wasn't enough.
Ultimately, Ryan decided to quit in August of 2020, making her ineligible for unemployment.
I was very stressed that I had made the wrong decision, especially during a pandemic.
But, you know, there's like a boundary or a limit.
And that boundary was reached for me, and I decided to make a decision about it.
And I'm living with that decision.
Ryan's negative experience is similar to that of many Black employees who feel forced out of the workplace.
A number of surveys have found that people of color, African-Americans in particular, and women, find those
environments to be incredibly hostile.
So even when you have the credentials to do those jobs, often the environment is not
conducive to one's mental health or productivity in those occupations.
Former Facebook recruiter Rhett Lindsey says he also struggled to find an inclusive culture at a majority-white company.
When I was at Facebook, there was one meeting I had where we were focusing on diversity outreach, and I kid you not,
they were playing a song and they had the N-word repeatedly playing over and over.
It was uncensored.
I found that to be the last straw for me in terms of the disconnect and the lack of awareness.
Following the George Floyd protests, large companies across the U.S.
tried to rectify their shortcomings by setting diversity targets.
In August of 2020, Condé Nast announced award winning publishing executive Dawn Davis as the new
Editor-in-Chief of Bon Appétit magazine.
I am very pleased to see that they hired a really incredible Black woman to run the
magazine. However, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many Black people you hire, there is no actual
support or infrastructure behind the diversity and inclusion initiatives at a corporate level within the company.
In a statement to CNBC Make It, a Bon Appétit spokesperson said, "With new leadership in place, a healthy and
rewarding workplace culture built on exclusivity, respect, diversity and equality continues to be our top
priority." CNBC Make It reached out to Adam Rapoport, but he did not respond to multiple requests for
comment. Facebook also tried to improve its diversity efforts by promoting Chief Diversity Officer Maxine
Williams in the summer of 2020.
And it felt very convenient that it happened around the Black Lives Matter protests and the injustices that were happening in
our society when this woman does an amazing job and she's been part of this organization for much longer.
Experts are wary about whether public displays of solidarity will actually lead to lasting change.
It's not enough just to put a black square on your Instagram page.
You have to do more. You actually have to take concrete steps, sustainable steps to actually create these pathways for people
to experience upward mobility.
And inclusivity is often the missing piece to making those changes, with recruiters lacking awareness around hiring
biases and practices at their firms.
There was several instances where whenever there's a hire made from a diverse talent, and a lot of times it was
Black professionals, they were celebrating what they would call wins by popping champagne bottles, toasting.
Being the only Black male within my direct org, and I'm seeing my counterparts who are majority Caucasian, celebrating
and toasting. That's really strange to me, and it made me very uncomfortable.
And it goes back to slavery of the competitiveness of betting on a slave based on their skill sets and the attributes of physical
attributes. And whoever gets it, that owner is happy.
And I'm not saying that that's the mindset of these companies, I know it's not, but that's what's reflective when you don't have
the inclusion piece as someone like myself, that doesn't feel included.
That's what we think. That's what we visualize.
Ryan and Rhett's negative experiences as Black employees in primarily white workplaces are
all too common. When things continue to go unchecked, federal agencies like the EEOC
are meant to provide protection.
In 2019, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 24,000 race-related
discrimination charges, making up 33% of charges filed that year.
About 80% of those charges were filed by Black employees.
But the EEOC has reportedly experienced severe cuts to their own resources and staff.
Between 1980 and 2018, the EEOC staff numbers fell from 3,390
to 1,968.
During that same time period, the U.S.
population grew by 44%, which might explain why the EEOC struggles to resolve
most of the charges filed with the agency.
Of the percentage of ones where we said, you know, we found cause to believe that there is discrimination.
You know, the percentage is not very high.
Basically, it's topped out around 20%.
And that's because we get so many charges.
When Rhett left Facebook following a string of incidents, he used recruiting experience to work towards a solution.
I was talking with my husband and I was like, "You know, I think I should look for another job.
I think it's time for me to find another opportunity." And he said, "No, because you're going to go to another company and it's
going to be the same situation where you're not filling the inclusion piece." And so I was really trying to strategize what
can I do to make sure that people of all shades, all demographics have the same opportunities.
Rhett's application Siimee utilizes anonymity with the goal of eliminating bias in the hiring process.
Candidate profiles will only display initials to protect against name bias, and photos will be hidden when employees are matched
for a role. As a former recruiter, Rhett hopes his app will address the company's shortcomings when
diversifying their talent.
I think the idea that it's a pipeline issue is absolutely incorrect.
It's not a pipeline issue.
The talent is out there.
But here's where the problem falls.
See, companies like to identify cultural fit.
They not only are marketing that culture out, which automatically eliminates people to even want to engage in applied to that role
or company, and then they're also evaluating who they are interviewing to make sure they fit into this cultural fit idea
that they've established.
So it shouldn't be about cultural fit.
It should be about cultural add, cultural bonus.
A Facebook spokesperson told Make It, "We're focused on diversity and inclusivity, as well as advancing racial justice
both in our own workplace as well as in how we recruit candidates to work here." Facebook denied
allegations that they assessed for cultural fit during the interview process.
The company did not address the song incident from the recruitment meeting or the celebratory champagne toast for diverse
hires. In 2019, companies that were in the top quartile for ethnic diversity
were 36% more likely to have above average profitability than those in the bottom quartile.
Across our society, it's important that we have a diversity of viewpoint and opinion and experience
and knowledge so that we're really getting the best of our country and all that all communities have to offer.
As for Ryan, she is still struggling financially, but she has found opportunities to share her story with much larger
audiences. In March of 2021, it was announced that Ryan would be assisting with an HBO max
show about a young group of assistants dismantling a toxic media corporation.
Right now I'm freelancing, writing, looking for jobs, just trying to figure out exactly what I want to
do. I hope that more people speak up about their experiences.
And I think the more people speak up about it, the stronger our voices will be collectively.