Holding Ourselves Accountable

Last month, our agency renewed its commitments to fighting systemic racism and the continued oppression of people of color, specifically of Black people.

We committed to combatting the structural inequities that exist in our communities, and discrimination that is present in our own internal systems.

We committed to action and to change. And we committed to holding ourselves accountable in the process.

Today, we’re taking a step toward accountability by sharing data on the diversity of our U.S. senior leadership and broader team by race.

It’s not a positive story, but it’s an important one.

We believe that real progress going forward will be accelerated by transparency on where we stand today. But change starts with clear benchmarks to measure long-term, lasting impact.

This is our reality today.

While diversity, equity and inclusion are core values we uphold at Weber Shandwick, the headline – on every level – is that people of color are grossly underrepresented in our agency. This data shows that our values simply aren’t reflected in the make-up of our workforce.

We have to do better. And we have to move as quickly as possible. It will be a formidable journey and it will require an action plan devised with more rigor and more resources than we’ve designated previously.

We take seriously the strengthened commitment we made to increase the diversity of the Weber Shandwick population – at every level – leveraging all the tools at our disposal to recruit, mentor, sponsor and advance colleagues of color.

This goes hand-in-hand with other critical efforts to advance equity in our agency and beyond, including ensuring that inclusivity is embedded in our workplaces and our work, and supporting outside organizations that fight for equality and justice.

We will continue to share our progress against these efforts as we set targets, reinvent our approach and leverage our talent to contribute to a greater good.

We owe it to our Black and brown colleagues who come to work at Weber Shandwick and across our industry every day, and to the many more that we hope will join us in the future.

*Note: We included EEO-1 sector data from 2018 (the latest available) to compare our representation against our respective category – though this isn’t an achievement. The category on the whole has a long road ahead to achieve the diversity necessary for true inclusion and representation of the communities we serve.