For the eighth consecutive year, black diversity inside of Citigroup Inc., America’s fourth-largest bank, is down to just 1 in 10 employees, according to the company’s own internal diversity report.
At the executive or senior manager level, black workers make up just 10.4% of Citigroup’s workforce, compared to 77.9% of whites. Among mid-level managers and professionals, black employees comprise 5.4% and 7.1%, respectively. At the administrative support level, which requires less experience or education, black people still make up only 16.4% of the financial services company’s workforce.
“While our commitment to diversity is strong, we realize that Citi’s representation numbers for female and black talent lag behind where we want to be as a firm,” said Jennifer Lowney, a Citigroup spokeswoman. “This year we are setting additional representation goals for females globally and for black employees in the U.S. to help drive faster progress.”
But Citigroup isn’t alone. In a lengthy article published in 2017, Bloomberg examined black diversity on Wall Street. The publication found that as the U.S. workforce gets increasingly diverse, there has been regression among some of the largest companies on Wall Street since 2012.
Black workers only make up 5.4% of U.S. employees and 2.9% of executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. At Morgan Stanley, black executives are even rarer at 2.2%, according to Bloomberg. At Wells Fargo, black employees make up 13% of the workforce, while executives fell to 5% from 8% a year earlier. Black workers at Bank of America remain at 13%, while black executives rose to 3.8%.
Citigroup’s 2017 diversity report“Look, we can call it not caring, we can call it not having the will, we can call it not having incentives, not having accountability,” Professor Martin Davidson at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business told Bloomberg in 2017. “Whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is there’s not enough energy and resources being put into figuring out how to catalyze this black talent.”
At Wells Fargo and Citigroup, Bloomberg found that women are underrepresented among senior ranks although its staff is majority female. Women make up 29% of executives at Wells Fargo, down from 37% in 2016 and 32% at Citigroup, up from 24%. The figure remains at 22% at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.