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Racial justice protests prompt changes at some Seattle corporations

Six months after the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, here's what some Seattle-based companies are doing differently to make a difference.

SEATTLE — Talisa Lavarry spent 10 years in corporate America working as an event planner for a handful of companies. She said it was a dream job that came with a lot of drama. 

"I struggled for years wondering what was wrong with me," Lavarry said. "How could I better myself, fix myself? What soft skills did I need? How do you get a seat at the table?  Am I not professional enough? I felt like I couldn't get it right no matter how hard I tried."

Lavarry described the main problem as biases and microaggressions, which are described as the indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group. 

Lavarry shared one of the more egregious examples. 

"A colleague was saying how she would bring her husband to the event and I said, 'Oh we can bring a guest?' And she said, 'Oh as long as he doesn't have braided hair and gold teeth,'" said Lavarry.

Ruchika Tulshyan, an inclusion strategist and author of "The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality In The Workplace," said stories like Lavarry's are quite common. In fact, for a new book she will release in 2021, she interviewed 50 women around the world about their experiences in corporations and found a lot of similarities. 

Tulshyan said until the protests this summer, most companies were reluctant to even talk about race.

"When I was asked to speak to organizations, especially large organizations, the call to action was please don't talk about race. You can mention it, but please just talk about gender equality and women in the workplace," said Tulshyan.

And in her work, Tulshyan points to another frustration that gets in the way of progress. 

"This idea of meritocracy, that if you work hard enough you will get ahead, and therefore if people are not represented then it's because they didn't try hard enough and therefore didn't get the degrees," said Tulshyan. "They didn't lean in hard enough. And what we find is that is absolutely not true, and data backs this up."  

According to research in the Administrative Science quarterly, the discrimination starts even before the interview process. Out of 1,600 people studied, 25% of Black candidates received callbacks if their resumes removed racial clues like a first name or affiliation, while only 10% got calls when they left ethnic details intact. Among Asians, 21% got calls if they used so called "whitened resumes," whereas only 11.5% heard back if they sent resumes with racial references.

And there appears to be economic consequences. Research shows the Black and white wealth gap is as wide as it was in 1968, regardless of an individual's education level. Black families whose main wage earners graduated from college have about 33% less wealth than white families whose heads dropped out of high school.

After the recent Black Lives Matter protests, numerous corporations publicly expressed their support and promised change. 

Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, said the company started focusing on race and efforts to reduce bias back in 2018.

Their own data shows the progress has been slow. In some cases, they have gone backwards. But after the recent protests, the company doubled down by implementing bonuses for senior executives if they hit specific diversity targets.

Redfin also is moving towards what is known as pay transparency. 

Experts say it's one way to reduce the pay gap between men and women and between white people and people of color. 

"You have to be able to tell a Black employee, a female employee, a white employee, here's the average," said Kelman. "You are below because you are underperforming or you are above the average because you are overperforming and here's the data. There is no more sincere recognition than just paying people what is right."

Meanwhile, other Seattle-based companies are also ramping up diversity efforts.

In late summer, Amazon announced a number of new hires in key positions and appointed the first Black executive to Jeff Bezos' "S-team," which is a group of leaders who set the company's priorities.

Nordstrom says by the end of 2025 it will increase representation of Black and Latino people in leadership roles by 50%. 

Starbucks set similar goals and launched a mentorship program to connect Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) partners to senior leaders.

But research might suggest these are also good business decisions. 

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company found in the three years it studied that companies with racial and ethnic diversity on the executive team financially outperformed those without by more than 30%.

And Kelman says his company has seen firsthand the value of diverse teams.

"It wasn't just some high-minded liberalism; it was business pragmatism," Kelman said. "There are all sorts of problems where we kept looking at it one way until we brought a diverse team onto that problem and had all sorts of perspectives and a better capacity to listen and to be humble and to think that we might be too full of ourselves."

T-Mobile also publicly stated its support of Black Lives Matter during the recent protests, but did not return a request for information on their diversity efforts.  

But Lavarry is proof that hiring for diversity is very different than retention. 

She left corporate America and is now running her own consulting business. She has also released a book called "Confessions From Your Token Black Colleague."

She says it's validation for some and a call to action for executives. 

"The request is, yes, for you to eliminate bias and increase the number of marginalized people in your company and not to just check a box," Lavarry said. "Yes, it's an investment of time and money, but it's worth it."

This story was produced as part of “Facing Race,” a KING 5 series that examines racism, social justice and racial inequality in the Pacific Northwest. Tune in to KING 5 on Sundays at 9:30 p.m. to watch live and catch up on our coverage here.

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