Prior to starting my study of Diversity in the Workplace, I felt that my employer fostered a diverse workplace. Because my company employees a number of people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, I accredited this to mean that I worked for a diverse employer. For myself this diversity of people from different cultures established my company a diverse place to work. I felt compelled after starting this course to speak with others in my workplace to establish and learn the feelings that my co-workers had about this subject. I was surprised to learn that some of my co-workers, which I had spoken with about this topic, did not feel that they worked for a diverse company.
Their feelings stemmed from the large imbalance of cultural diversity within the management of the company. Most people that I spoke with said that cultural diversity was more than just hiring professional workers of different age, sex, race and religion. To have a truly cultural diverse company we would need to start looking at our management staff, and our lack of diversity at a more senior level of the business. Management often encourages its employees to "think outside of the box", but how can the employees do this when management does not. .
I started to think about this issue, and although my employer has been successful in grasping diversity in hiring of professional employees, they still did lack diversity when it came to their upper and middle level of managers. To gain greater knowledge about my company's management staff, and became of my own curiosity, I started to analyze the company's organization chart. .
As I analyzed this information it was clear that white males accounted for over 90% of upper or middle management positions held within the company. The other 10% of the company's managers are white females. Without knowing the actual age of the entire management staff, I then started to look at the approximate age of our managers.