Goldman Sachs to invest billions in Black women

London (CNN Business)Goldman Sachs has just 49 Black executives and senior managers in its US workforce, accounting for about 3% of the total.

In a sustainability report published Tuesday, the investment bank revealed data on the racial and gender composition of its US workforce for the first time. The numbers reflect a very low rate of Black employment across almost all roles in the organization.
Of 1,548 US executives and senior managers, just 24 are Black men and 25 are Black women, or about 3.2% of the total, according to Goldman Sachs (GS).

Black people make up a similar percentage of middle managers and sales representatives. Numbers increase in professional roles in other areas such as compliance, investing and marketing, but are still out of step with the wider US population: Of the 12,521 professionals the Wall Street bank employs, 452 are Black men and 418 are Black women, accounting for 7%.

Overall, Black people make up 6.8% of Goldman Sachs’ US workforce. According to Census Bureau data, about 13.4% of the US population is Black.

“We’ve made good progress on our aspirational diversity and inclusion goals,” CEO David Solomon wrote in the introduction to the report, adding that recent partner and managing director classes were the “most diverse” in the company’s history.
“There’s still a long road ahead, but I will continue to make this effort a personal priority.”
Last year, dozens of US companies, including Amazon (AMZN), Starbucks (SBUX), General Motors (GM) and major banks, committed to publicly disclosing the composition of their workforces by race, ethnicity and gender.
The move followed pressure from the New York City comptroller and three city retirement funds, calling on companies to back up statements in support of racial equity with “concrete actions” by publishing information reported to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) recently published ethnicity data for 2020 showing that 5% of its US executives and senior level managers are Black. At Morgan Stanley (MS), 37 out of 1,705 senior leaders are Black, or just over 2%, according to the bank’s 2020 Diversity and Inclusion Report.

Black people made up 5% of Bank of America’s (BAC) US executives and senior managers in 2019, up from 4% in 2015. Of Citigroup’s (C) 108 US senior leaders in 2019, four were Black men and there were no Black women.
According to a report published by Goldman Sachs last month, America’s Black women hold 90% less wealth than White American men. The bank is investing $10 billion over the next decade to address the disparities Black women face throughout their lives in areas such as healthcare, education, housing and small business.
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