I feel like their general counsel should not have allowed any of this to happen.
Under the Civil Rights Act / Equal Opportunity law, race and gender are protected classes. So having your executives on record saying that "white women" are "some of the biggest barriers to progress" seems dangerous.
I'm not a lawyer, but when your employee tells Business Week that "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'", that seems like a legal disaster.
Replace "white" with any other color and notice how flagrantly racist and illegal that sounds. The law does not distinguish.
They need to fix this quickly.
They should assure people both internally and externally that hiring and promotion will be meritocratic, without regard to gender or race, and then ensure it actually happens that way.
Under the Civil Rights Act / Equal Opportunity law, race and gender are protected classes. So having your executives on record saying that "white women" are "some of the biggest barriers to progress" seems dangerous.
I'm not a lawyer, but when your employee tells Business Week that "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'", that seems like a legal disaster.
Replace "white" with any other color and notice how flagrantly racist and illegal that sounds. The law does not distinguish.
They need to fix this quickly.
They should assure people both internally and externally that hiring and promotion will be meritocratic, without regard to gender or race, and then ensure it actually happens that way.