The Diversity List is a tool for discovering and assessing the state of fashion’s makeup. By drawing on 100 percent publicly available data on diversity and inclusion, we’re making transparent what has often been obscured. The aim? Let people better understand the businesses they’ll work for or buy from, and let fashion reckon with the work it needs to do on diversity.
Since there’s often little to love about a methodology page, we’ve tried to make it as easy to digest as possible.
How did you choose the 100 companies?
The 100 companies in The Diversity List are among the top in the fashion industry, and we curated the group based on their reach, relevance and availability of data.
Why the fashion industry?
Because, in many ways, fashion brands and businesses have perhaps made the biggest splash in terms of its new people of color commitments, without always being transparent about what they’re doing internally. Also, it’s the industry we both know and considered the best first place to start. Ideally, The Diversity List could come to reflect representation across other industries, too.
Where did you get the data?
After many long hours and too many open browser tabs, we gathered all of the publicly-available data from company investor relations websites, annual reports, sustainability reports, corporate social responsibility reports and their Instagram pages. Click “Sources” under the people icons for each company and you’ll be able to peruse all of the sources that informed The Diversity List.
Why do you show all of the companies as having 100 employees?
Because who wants to do math if they don’t have to? Since companies share their diversity breakdowns as percentages, we simplified things for the sake of understanding the balance of ethnicities. If a company says 1 percent of its workforce is Black, it’s much easier to understand that 1 percent of a 100-person company would mean they’ve employed one Black person. It becomes more complicated when you’re trying to quickly get a sense of what 1 percent of 14,236 employees looks like.
Why are you showing ethnicity data for companies’ total workforce (including retail and warehouse/distribution center) when we really want to see what’s happening at the corporate level?
We know the conversation around the lack of diversity and calls for transparency around it are largely targeted at the corporate level, where faces become exceptionally less diverse. We also know that tallying up an ethnicity breakdown after including retail and warehouse workers often makes for higher People of Color counts, which is to the company’s benefit. However, the overwhelming majority of companies on the list only report the data for their total US workforce, and just a few provided breakdowns at the corporate level. Since part of The Diversity List’s aim is to make an apples-to-apples comparison of companies in the fashion industry, we tried to make the data align across the list of 100 as much as possible.
Why haven’t some companies reported any data around ethnicity?
While US companies with 100+ staff are required to report race and ethnicity data to the government, they don’t always share it with the public, or they make finding it a game of chase that many may tire of before they get what they’re after. We have reported all of the available data we could find. In much of Europe, laws around data collection limit companies from disseminating diversity breakdowns. For many of the Europe-based companies in The Diversity List, this info isn’t available. *You’ll find notes on where each company is based in the text right below their name.
Why are you including the companies that haven’t reported data around ethnicity?
Two reasons: one, it’s still worth seeing the diversity (or lack thereof) among their executive leadership teams and in the boardrooms, which is data we do have; and, two, the hope is that they’ll ultimately embrace transparency and provide the info they haven’t shared.
Why are some companies listed and others aren’t?
Some notable names would appear to be missing from the list--Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Cole Haan, Dolce & Gabbana--but as privately owned companies, they’re not required to report the same level of data public companies are. A public company has essentially used an initial public offering, or IPO, to sell itself to the public in the form of shares of stock in the company. That means the public has a right to know what’s going on with it. But the upside for public companies is that they can use those sold stocks to raise money for growth and expansion. A private company doesn’t automatically mean it’s small or broke, sometimes it’s quite the opposite and they can draw funding from investors. The biggest pro for private companies is that they don’t have to answer to stockholders (the public) and they don’t have to file disclosure statements. So that’s why, in most cases, we have no diversity data from them to share.
Three private companies--Good American, Rent the Runway, Toms--are included on The Diversity List because they decided to share their ethnicity data anyway.
What’s the difference between Executive Leadership and the Boardroom?
The Executive Leadership team are company staff at the highest level of management who are responsible for leading and managing the organization. The Boardroom reflects each company’s board of directors, a mix of executives from within the organization and key appointed leaders from outside of the organization that have insight and expertise to lend. Their job is to ensure the company’s prosperity by directing its affairs in a way that aligns with what shareholders and stakeholders want. The company CEO will be on both the executive leadership team and the board of directors.
Why are you showing both parent companies and their brands in some cases?
Well, put simply, many consumers may not think to search for information on Tapestry if they want to know about the diversity breakdown at Coach. Since The Diversity List is about improving the average person’s access to this information, we’re aligning the data with how that person might look for it. For the sake of industry insiders or those keen to know about the parent company’s overarching reporting and position on diversity and inclusion, we’ve included those, too.
Why did you categorize the ethnicities the way you did?
Because many of the companies on The Diversity List are US-based and reporting according to US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines, they’re giving their employees the same boxes to tick, and we have reflected the data just as they do. In our list, note that “Black” reflects reporting on Black and African American employees and “Latinx” reflects reporting on Latinx and Hispanic employees. Because companies don’t have consistent reporting for indigenous peoples, we have included Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander as “Native.” Also, as most companies have so few indigenous peoples on their workforce, if they report any at all, we are not able to reflect any numbers below 1 percent on the list.
Why did you choose the colors that you did to represent each ethnicity?
The answer here is manifold. First, we wanted the colors to give a sense of skin, to draw attention to the fact that this is so much of how the world has historically categorized us and, in so many ways, how we continue to be categorized today. Still, because we know one single color couldn’t begin to represent the multi-hues of a race, we’ve chosen to dress our people icons in clothing that aligns with each representative color so as not to overemphasize these colors as their complexion.
You have male and female listed as the only genders--what about Intersex, Non-binary, gender non-conforming folk?
All US companies with 100 or more employees have to file an annual EEO-1 report to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The federally mandated report, which asks for employment data on ethnicity, gender and job category has only ever allowed for a binary reporting system, male or female. In August 2019, the EEOC said companies could reflect data on non-binary gender--anyone who does not identify as exclusively male or female--employees in a comment section of the report, but an official box for nonbinary individuals has not been added to the EEO-1 form. These constraints have likely limited companies in reporting data on their non-binary identifying employees, so The Diversity List reflects companies’ reports on male and female staff. The hope is that the federal reporting requirements will be changed to embrace inclusivity beyond biologically designated sex.
What about the representation of LGBTQIA+ folk?
As much as companies tout their participation in Pride parades and their company support groups or resources for the LGBTQIA+ community, there’s little to no known reporting as to how many individuals from the community work within the company, and in which roles.
What about disabled people?
Similar to the question right above this one, most companies have notes in diversity and inclusion reports or corporate social responsibility reports about outreach among disabled people, but data on their roles in the workforce is scant. In the “Sources” section of each company’s profile, all reports we referenced are linked where you can explore in greater detail what fashion firms are saying about disabled inclusion.
Why aren’t there more Black or POC-owned businesses listed?
As a Black and POC-owned project, we would have loved nothing more than to see more of these diverse businesses reflected. But as we noted in outlining why some companies made the list, many Black and POC-owned businesses are private and don’t share their diversity numbers. *See the question “Why are some companies listed and others aren’t?” above for notes on the differences between public and private companies.