Demographics Reporting
Willing Observers conducts demographic reports, focusing on the composition of leadership in for-profit organizations.
Leadership is defined as individuals who inhabit the occupational roles that provide strategic direction for an organization, including setting priorities and instituting new workplace processes. For public for-profit corporations, this usually includes two major categories: (1) executive leadership (the highest-ranking management positions) and (2) board membership (positions held in a company’s board of directors).
To document gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in leadership, we research biographical information of board members and executive teams, retrieving publicly available information from official company websites, personal profiles published on LinkedIn, and websites published by Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Fortune, and other outlets.*
In the absence of company disclosures of demographic information from EEO-1 data, this kind of public biographical data is crucial for identifying demographic trends within corporate leadership.
Data Analysis
Because discrimination is a social phenomenon, when assessing publicly available information, Willing Observers approaches biographical data by aggregating information found about individuals’ self-identification with the framing of individuals by other sources (e.g. newspaper reporting). We take into account the dynamics of discrimination to acknowledge that individuals and media outlets may refrain from disclosing some information about leaders’ identities to create a better fit within corporate hierarchies, such as listing white- and cis- passing names, biographies, and pictures.
In Willing Observers’ research and reporting conducted thus far, including some studies that have asked Willing Observers to review over 10,000 individuals, our percentage of uncertainty in reporting is less than 1%, which is a very small potential human error rate.
Depending on the focus of the report and the needs of the client, we break down data analyses by sector, industry, state, region, profit, growth, and/or specific identity categorization.
A Census-Based Approach
In Willing Observers’ reports, demographic diversity of leadership is measured, where possible, using a census-based approach. This means that the composition of boards and executive leadership teams are compared with the wider demographic make-up of the United States, as drawn from racial and ethnic categories and data estimates provided by the United States Census. In Willing Observers’ most recent reports, 2019 Census data has been used over more recent surveys as this data has been broken down by both race and gender. However, even as Willing Observers uses the U.S. Census as a baseline, we recognize that many categories and categorizations used in the Census do not capture the realities of how individuals identify and are identified in the United States. To this point, we include footnotes throughout our reports that indicate how we use and parse Census data to reach conclusions and present analyses. More elaboration on race, ethnicity, and gender is provided below.
Expanding Gender Categories & Categorization
In our reporting, gender is largely assessed as binary: men and women. Willing Observers has attempted but has yet been unable to represent gender more expansively in terms of sex/gender/sexuality. This is largely because robust information about non-heteronormative sexuality and non-binary gender identity/expression is rarely made publicly available by and about members of executive teams and boards. However, data analyses in Willing Observers’ demographics reporting treats gender more dynamically in two ways: (1) by capturing obvious and visible LGBTQIA+ representation in leadership, and (2) by consistently representing intersections between race, ethnicity, and gender in data visualizations, including in the creation of a dedicated “Intersectionality” section within our reporting.
A Unique Approach to Assessment: Scoring
After all data collection and analysis are complete on a given data set, we score and rank companies in terms of representation in leadership. We do this by first assigning points to companies within a given data set (e.g. Fortune 500), according to a scoring system derived from percentage representation of three historically marginalized categories of persons in the United States: White Women (WW), Women of Color (WOC), and Men of Color (MOC). The scoring system has a maximum of 10 points. When specific percentages of representation are achieved within an organization’s leadership team in each of the above categories, organizations acquire points, attributed on a sliding scale, with a maximum of 3 points per category (WW, WOC, MOC). All companies begin with 1 point, attributed for any diversity in leadership. This point can be lost if a company has no diverse representation in leadership. Willing Observers hopes to incorporate LGBTQIA+ data into the scoring system in the future, if and as census data becomes available.
The scoring system was developed in 2022. In previous reporting, organizations were ranked based on a comparison of percentage gender and race/ethnicity representation in executive leadership teams and boards, relative to the size of each executive team and board. While this remains an accurate ranking system, one that is used broadly in demographic reporting, it can obscure data points that are important to elevate, such as intersections between race and gender/ethnicity. The point system developed for this report captures some of this intersectional data, making it both more visible and more central to company comparisons and rankings. Willing Observers prioritizes this scoring system in an attempt to create an equitable benchmark that considers the intersectional population of the United States.
We focus on these identity categories in scoring as they capture intersections of sex/gender and race/ethnicity that have been both obscured in demographic reporting and underrepresented in leadership due to the historical and current legacies of racism and gender-based forms of oppression in the U.S.