Goldman Reveals Black Workforce Numbers for the First Time

(Bloomberg) -- Inside Goldman Sachs Group Inc., 1,548 U.S. executives, senior officials and managers run the bank. Of that group, 24 are Black men and 25 are Black women.

That's one of the new pieces of data released by the bank for the first time Tuesday as part of its sustainability report.

“There's still a long road ahead,” Chief Executive Officer David Solomon wrote in the introduction, “but I will continue to make this effort a personal priority.”

The report provides the clearest look yet inside Goldman's U.S. workforce. Below those top executives, in a group of 3,411 first-level officials and middle managers, 57 are Black men and 48 are Black women. Overall, the data show a slight improvement at a firm where Black people make up 6.8% of the U.S. workforce, up from 6.6% in last year's report. About 13.4% of the U.S. population is Black, according to the Census Bureau.

“Everybody recognizes the need to be more transparent,” Erika Irish Brown, the bank's former head of diversity, said during Bloomberg's New Voices event in December. “Our people want that transparency.” She left the bank last month for Citigroup Inc., and was succeeded by Megan Hogan.

Goldman has more Black executives in the U.S. than Morgan Stanley, where 37 out of 1,705 leaders are Black. Inside Bank of America Corp., there are 201 Black senior officials out of 4,191 total in the country, and Citigroup's 108 leaders in 2019 included four Black men and no Black women. Ray McGuire, one of Wall Street's most prominent Black bankers, left Citigroup last year to join New York's mayoral race.

Goldman's new numbers show that 160 Asian men and 74 Asian women are executives in the U.S., or about 15% of the top group. Fewer than one in four firm executives -- 24.7% -- are women.

The bank is asking shareholders to vote against an independent racial audit of its business, a deep dive to see how the New York-based firm may have contributed to racial inequities in the financial system. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. went as far as asking regulators to block similar resolutions, attempts that were denied.

Read how shareholder-advisory firms take opposing view on audits

The numbers were a long time coming. For years, many of the biggest U.S. banks have publicly shared data on their U.S. employees by giving percentages rather than hard numbers. Last year, Goldman and dozens of other firms agreed to disclose detailed information on race, gender and ethnicity as part of a push by the New York City comptroller and three city retirement funds.

“As we seek to advance racial equity, both at our firm and in our communities, we want to emphasize that this is a key moment to effect lasting improvement,” Hogan wrote in the report. “We are at a pivotal inflection point, and this conversation is just the beginning.”

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