Diversity@Work

Employers Go All-Out For Minority Undergrads

posted at 1 November 2007 by diversitygirl

By Pepi Sappal

Twenty-one-year-old Madeline Sola hasn’t graduated from college yet. But the mechanical-engineering major already has her first employer lined up.

If she wants it, Sola has a job waiting for her at Pratt & Whitney, an aircraft-engine, space-propulsion-system and gas-turbine maker in East Hartford, Conn., when she graduates from Massachusetts’s Worcester Polytechnic Institute next year. Not a bad position to be in, given the job market for new grads.

Many undergraduates have had a particularly hard time landing jobs lately because of competition from experienced candidates, says Bill Krutzen, director of operations at HireDiversity.com, an Internet job board. “What makes matters worse is that the experienced jobless are prepared to take a newly graduated person’s salary as they are so desperate for work,” he says.

But information-technology and engineering graduates of color have an easier time in the job market “because there’s so few of them,” says Stephanie Blaisdell, director of diversity and women’s programs at Worcester Polytechnic, an engineering university. “Nationally, only 6.6% of African-Americans and 7% of Hispanics pursue engineering,” she says. “And less than 1% [of engineers] are Native American.”

Employers’ interest in diversity hiring helped all of WPI’s minority 2003 graduates secure jobs quickly. Even during the downturn, recruiting minority students remained a priority for many companies, says Sharon Lutz, director of the Ford Careers Center at the University of Texas in Austin. She adds that many employers are “extremely aggressive” about hiring them.

Degrees Can Dictate Demand

Demand for minority students varies by discipline but is particularly strong for those in engineering and technological fields, says John Miller, president and publisher of Equal Opportunity Publications Inc., which publishes Hispanic Engineer, Woman Engineer and other magazines. Recruitment ads in the company’s minority engineering titles were up 25% in 2003 from fall 2002, he notes. The job market for minority graduates should improve further by spring 2004, raising the company’s ad revenue another 5% to 10%.

Lucrative government contracts have caused this latest recruiting surge for minority engineers. The government requires contractors to meet guidelines regarding minority employment. For defense contractors, $380 billion in business is at stake, and many companies need diversity to win a share, Miller says. That means “proving to government watchdogs that a good-faith effort is [being] made to recruit diversity,” he says.

Meanwhile, savvy global marketers, such as Xerox Corp. and Dell Inc., are hoping to hire more employees of color to address changing customer demographics. Consumers in the U.S. are becoming more diverse, and global markets are growing more important to overall revenues.

Companies Get Competitive

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, career-services director Richard White meets weekly with representatives of such companies as Johnson & Johnson, IBM Corp., Pfizer Inc. and Citigroup, which have diversity programs designed to entice the best students of color, he says. Hispanic, African-American and Native American students who have good academic records and relevant internship experience are especially prized recruits.

“Although we aren’t hiring as much as before [the recession], when we do, the emphasis is on quality, high-performing students,” says Joe Hammill, Xerox’s manager of talent acquisition. Xerox starts forging relationships with minority undergraduates when they start their degree programs, he says. “To get the highfliers early, we have to win over the best candidates well before they graduate, because the competition, particularly for talented technical undergraduates, is extremely intense,” he says.

Xerox taps into the pool of talented minority students by maintaining relationships with historically black colleges and universities with significant Hispanic-student populations. The company also recruits through its black and Hispanic college liaison programs and chapters of professional organizations such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, says Hammill.

The Role of Liaison Officers

Liaison officers are Xerox employees and alumni of the particular universities. They visit campuses to meet with faculty and students to discuss potential careers opportunities at Xerox and to assist students with developmental needs. “We also help out with resumes, access to mentors and possible internships,” says Xerox employee and liaison officer Kelia Peña, 31. The program gives Xerox an advantage “because it provides us with links and access to the best students of color,” she says.

Peña joined Xerox five years ago after completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in industrial engineering at the University of Buffalo. She was inundated with job offers from various employers, but Xerox’s liaison program won her over, and she became part of the company’s asset-management diversity program for African-Americans and Hispanics. She has held positions in project management, manufacturing engineering, supply-chain management and human resources. Her next role is project manager of service development for Xerox global services.

Prospects for Nontechnical Grads

In fields less technical than engineering, some students of color have it just as tough or tougher in the job market than nonminority graduates. Aquyla Walker, a 22-year-old African-American, has been job hunting with little success since graduating in May from Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., with a dual degree in English and world literature and fiction writing.

“I began my search initially for a career in public relations, and then extended it to a diversity-related role, preferably at an academic organization, but despite an intensive job search, I have not had much luck in either,” says Walker. “Nor have fellow students who pursued business degrees.”

Employers say they want diversity, but Walker challenges these claims. “Students like myself believe that firms are doing little more than paying lip-service to diversity,” she says.

How to Boost Your Odds

Still, students of color can improve their odds of getting professional jobs by graduation, especially if they start their searches early, says Chuck Knippen, campus-diversity-programs manager at Monster Worldwide Inc., an Internet job-posting firm based in New York City.

Large companies are making an effort to demonstrate that their environments are conducive for minority hires and that there’s potential for advancement, says Knippen. Minority students can improve their prospects of joining such companies by seeking them out, he says.

“Attend career fairs and build a relationship with the companies you want to work for,” he advises. “Do some research to find out exactly what the recruiting standards are and what type of attributes they’re looking for and work towards that. If you do it early, even in the second or third year of [college], you won’t have to put so much pressure on yourself in the senior year.”

Many employers also are looking for relevant experience on resumes. Internships are highly recommended, because they make students more marketable, says Peña, but some students can’t afford to participate in them because they’re unpaid.

A Student Does It All

Sola sought every advantage she could. She worked with Inroads Inc., a national organization, based in St. Louis, Mo., that helps students of color find internships, particularly in science, engineering and business fields. “They hooked me up with Pratt & Whitney, and I interned for several semesters with them since high school,” she says. The internships, plus taking advantage of other diversity programs, helped her win the job offer, she says.

Students of color also can sidestep the competition by using diversity-oriented Internet job sites. “If you use a diversity or profession-specific board, you’ll not only be targeting jobs more carefully, but improving your odds of getting a job,” says Krutzen.

Even if employers are seeking graduates of color in your field, don’t become complacent, says Lutz. Whether or not demand is strong, minority students still must be competitive. Take advantage of campus career resources, prepare thoroughly for interviews and present a professional image, she advises. By doing so, you’ll have myriad opportunities open to you and be in the enviable position of choosing the career of your dreams.

About the Author

Ms. Sappal, the former editor of GlobalHR magazine, is a free-lance writer in London.

Source : College Journal

The Art of Diversity

posted at 18 October 2007 by diversitygirl

Culture in America is likely to be spelled these days with a hyphen. Watch it on TV. There’s Cuban-American singing star Gloria Estefan in a music video on MTV Latino. See it at the cinema. The film version of The Joy Luck Club, based on the popular novel by Chinese-American author Amy Tan, could be playing nearby. Theater? There’s the modern-dance show Griot New York, directed by Jamaican-American choreographer Garth Fagan. Poetry? Buy a book of verse by St. Lucian-born, Nobel-prizewinning poet Derek Walcott, who teaches at Boston University. Painting? New York’s Asia Society is holding a show that tours the country next year featuring Asian-American visual artists who emigrated from Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia.

And that’s just the beginning. “All American art is a function of the hybrid culture that resulted from centuries of immigration to this nation,” says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “We’re just more dramatically aware of it today.” American culture used to be depicted as a Eurocentric melting pot into which other cultures were stirred and absorbed. The recent waves of newcomers have changed that. Today it seems more like a street fair, with various booths, foods and peoples, all mixing on common sidewalks.

The new cultural carnival is most apparent in music. The New York-based, Irish-American group Black 47, which mixes rap, reggae and traditional Irish melodies, has appeared on both the Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The Los Angeles rap trio Cypress Hill, which includes an Italian American, a Cuban American and a member who is of Cuban and Mexican descent, released a hit album this year that started out at No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s album chart. Latin music has become such a significant force in pop music that MTV recently launched MTV Latino as a separate Spanish-language edition.

Cuban-born Estefan, with her dance-floor blend of R. and B. and Cuban polyrhythms, has established herself as the queen of the new Latin sound. Arriving in Miami from Havana when she was two years old, she grew up in a household immersed in traditional Cuban ballads. By the first grade, she was also listening to British-invasion bands. “It was natural to blend both elements,” says Estefan. “When immigrants come to America they bring their culture, and that culture becomes part of a new country. It makes everyone stronger.”

Her success helped launch other Latin acts. Cuban-born singer Jon Secada, who co-wrote several of Estefan’s best-selling songs, has since recorded his own hits, which combine elements of Cuban music, Top 40 and gospel. Says Secada: “Artists who want to experiment find a way of incorporating the things that are worthy from all types of music, like reggae, salsa and African sounds. And it finds a way onto the charts.”

The fashion industry has also felt the impact of newcomers. Immigrants from Asia have brought a clean, elegant new look to clothing design. Among them is Han Feng, who left Hangzhou, China, only eight years ago. Now head of her own design company, she sells easy-to-wear, simply shaped clothes to Bloomingdale’s and Saks. “Designers have been looking for a style for the ’90s,” says Kal Ruttenstein, senior vice president for fashion direction at Bloomingdale’s. “The simplified Oriental-inspired look might be a major look.”

African clothing, filtered through rap culture, influences fashion as well. The L.A.-based firm Threads for Life (also known as Cross Colours) sells hip- hop fashion inspired by urban youth and African designers, such as overalls with colorful kente-cloth patches. “It becomes not just a pair of jeans, but something that means something,” says firm co-owner Carl Jones. Company sales rose from $15 million in 1991 to $89 million in 1992.

The Joy Luck Club, born as a best-selling book, leads a recent surge in popular new movies written or directed by Asians. They include M. Butterfly, written by David Henry Hwang, the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants; the comedy Combination Platter, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Tony Chan; and The Wedding Banquet, a comedy directed by Ang Lee, who moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. Asian-style kickboxing movies have found an eager audience in the U.S. Recently one of Hong Kong’s best filmmakers, John Woo, relocated to Los Angeles to direct the action movie Hard Target (which stars Belgian-born martial-arts hero Jean-Claude Van Damme).

These Asian films are already spawning would-be imitators. “When something becomes a commercial success,” says novelist Tan, “it automatically opens the door, or at least the possibility, for other similar ventures. Already, in Hollywood, I’m hearing about people saying, ‘We think this will be another Joy Luck Club,’ about films they want to get produced.”

Hispanics in Hollywood, despite barriers, have also met with recent success. Latino actors Andy Garcia and Rosie Perez have become sought-after talents; the movie La Bamba grossed more than $50 million and sent the signal that Latino movies can be moneymakers. “In American society, transmitting culture is done in the marketplace,” says Gary Puckrein, editor in chief of American Visions, a magazine that covers culture in the U.S. “You see it in food, fashion, music and art.”

Other talented Latinos seek the big break. Actress Marga Gomez’s one-woman show, Memory Tricks, which deals with her father, a Cuban comic, and her mother, a Puerto Rican dancer, has been praised for its humor and startling candor. Gomez helped found the Latino comedy group Culture Clash (the troupe has a new series airing on Fox TV, where Gomez has made guest appearances), and she is adapting her show into a screenplay. “I think the essence of my $ work is that I come from some very strong backgrounds — gay, Cuban, Puerto Rican,” says Gomez, “and I don’t feel like I don’t fit into any one of them.”

In the visual arts, cultural outsiders often see what insiders miss. Japanese-born painter Masami Teraoka combines elements of European art and Japanese ukiyo-e wood-block imagery. From his unique perspective, he creates gothic halos around the heads of AIDS patients and condoms in the bedrooms of samurai. In his Harlem neighborhood, Jamaican-American artist Nari Wood collects discarded baby carriages and ties them together with fire hoses, making monuments to loss.

Such outsider viewpoints — from new Americans and even Native Americans — can influence others to see the world in a different light. To dramatize how the forces that ravaged the buffalo still exist, Native American sculptor Bob Haozous constructed 100 steel buffalo, then videotaped art-gallery patrons fighting to buy the pieces before they were sold out. Korean-American Nam June Paik, whose influential multimedia artworks incorporate TVs and computers, says he was talking about the information superhighway in his own work long before it became a catchword. And architect Maya Ying Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, designed the black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a stark monument that compels visitors not to revel in the glory of war, but to reflect on its sorrows.

Other artists have turned their sights on the nature of the immigrant experience itself. Choreographer Fagan’s touring show Griot New York features sets by noted sculptor Martin Puryear and music by trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. Employing a multiethnic troupe, Griot seeks to capture the drama of immigration. Says Fagan: “It’s a celebration of New York City, of West Indians, Indians and Africans, of big urban metropolises that are always being dumped on.” Fagan also wrote a poem to illustrate the show’s theme of diverse people traveling difficult routes to come together in one nation:

Ships Hold/ No Class

Reservations & plantations

concentration . . .

You/me/them/us/brethren/we/be

Celebrate

The celebration was a long time coming. To be an immigrant artist is to be a hyphen away from one’s roots, and still a thousand miles away. But it is often that link to a foreign land — another way of seeing things — that allows such artists to contribute ideas to American culture that are fresh and new. That slim hyphen, that thin line that joins individual Americans to their past, is also what connects all America to its future.

With reporting by Greg Aunapu/Miami and Georgia Harbison/New York

Source : Time.com

Keywords:Culture and Work diversity in the workplace Ethnicity and Work Workplace Diversity

Sphere It

Ignoring Diversity, Runways Fade to White

posted at 18 October 2007 by diversitygirl

By Guy Trebay

IN the days of blithe racial assumptions, flesh crayons were the color of white people. “Invisible” makeup and nude pantyhose were colored in the hues of Caucasian skin. The decision by manufacturers to ignore whole segments of humanity went unchallenged for decades before the civil rights movement came along and nonwhite consumers started demanding their place on the color wheel.

Nowadays the cultural landscape is well populated with actors, musicians, media moguls and candidates for the American presidency drawn from the 30 percent of the American population that is not white. Yet, if there is one area where the lessons of chromatic and racial diversity have gone largely unheeded, it is fashion. This reality was never plainer than during the recent showings of the women’s spring 2008 collections in New York and Europe.

Although black women in the United States spend more than $20 billion on apparel each year, according to estimates by TargetMarketNews.com, it was hard to discern an awareness of this fact on the part of designers showing in New York, where black faces were more absent from runways than they have been in years.

Of the 101 shows and presentations posted on Style.com during the New York runway season, which ended a month ago, more than a third employed no black models, according to Women’s Wear Daily. Most of the others used just one or two. When the fashion caravan moved to London, Paris and Milan, the most influential shows — from Prada to Jil Sander to Balenciaga to Chloé and Chanel — made it appear as if someone had hung out a sign reading: No Blacks Need Apply.

“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” said Bethann Hardison, a former model who went on to start a successful model agency in the 1980s that promoted racial diversity.

AMONG the people she represented were Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford, the chiseled hunk who broke barriers in the 1990s by becoming the unexpected symbol of the country-club fantasia that is a Ralph Lauren Polo campaign.

“It’s heartbreaking for me now because the agents send the girls out there to castings and nobody wants to see them,” said Ms. Hardison, referring to black models. “And if they do, they’ll call afterward and say, ‘Well, you know, black girls do much better in Europe, or else black girls do much better in New York, or we already have our black girl.’”

Last month in New York, Ms. Hardison convened a panel of fashion experts at the Bryant Park Hotel to discuss “The Lack of the Black Image in Fashion Today,” an event she will reprise Monday at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. “Modeling is probably the one industry where you have the freedom to refer to people by their color and reject them in their work,” she said.

The exclusion is rarely subtle. An agent for the modeling firm Marilyn once told Time magazine of receiving requests from fashion clients that baldly specified “Caucasians only.”

The message is not always so blatant these days, but it is no less clear. Take for example the case of two young models, one white, one black, both captivating beauties at the start of their careers. Irina Kulikova, a feline 17-year-old Russian, appeared on no fewer than 24 runways in New York last month, a success she went on to repeat in Milan with 14 shows, and in Paris with 24 more. Honorine Uwera, a young Canadian of Rwandan heritage, was hired during the New York season for just five runway shows.

While Ms. Uwera’s showing was respectable, it was not enough to justify the cost to her agency of sending her to Europe, where most modeling careers are solidified.

“We represent a lot of ethnic girls,” said Ivan Bart, the senior vice president of IMG Models, which represents a roster of the commercially successful models of the moment, among them black superstars like Alek Wek, Ms. Campbell and Liya Kebede.

“We have new girls, too,” Mr. Bart added, young comers like Ms. Uwera, Quiana Grant and Mimi Roche. “We include them in our show package, give them the same promotion as any other girl, and get the same responses: ‘She’s lovely, but she’s not right for the show.’”

Although, in fact, Ms. Roche and Ms. Grant, both black, were seen on runways in the last five weeks, the reality was that only one black model worked at anything like the frequency of her white counterparts: Chanel Iman Robinson, 17, who is African-American and Korean. Particularly in Milan and Paris, Ms. Robinson’s was often the only nonwhite face amid a blizzard of Eastern European blondes.

It is not just a handful of genetically gifted young women who are hurt by this exclusion. Vast numbers of consumers draw their information about fashion and identity from runways, along with cues about what, at any given moment, the culture decrees are the new contours of beauty and style.

“Years ago, runways were almost dominated by black girls,” said J. Alexander, a judge on “America’s Next Top Model,” referring to the gorgeous mosaic runway shows staged by Hubert de Givenchy or Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s. “Now some people are not interested in the vision of the black girl unless they’re doing a jungle theme and they can put her in a grass skirt and diamonds and hand her a spear.”

And some people, said Diane Von Furstenberg, the designer and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, “just don’t think about it at all.” Ms. Von Furstenberg herself has always employed models of all ethnicities on her runways. (This September, she hired seven black women, more perhaps than any single label except Baby Phat and Heatherette.) Yet she is increasingly the exception to an unspoken industry rule.

“I always want to do that,” she said, referring to the casting of women of color. “I can make a difference. We all can. But so much is about education and to talk about this is an important beginning.”

But isn’t it strange, she was asked, that she would have to invoke the rhetoric of racial inclusiveness at a time when Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in media, and Barack Obama is running for president?

“Why did we go backward?” Ms. Von Furstenberg asked.

Agents blame designers for the current state of affairs. Designers insist agents send them nothing but skinny blondes. Magazine editors bemoan the lack of black women with the ineffable attributes necessary to put across the looks of a given season.

The current taste in models is for blank-featured “androids,” whose looks don’t offer much competition to the clothes, pointed out James Scully, a seasoned agent who made his mark casting the richly diverse Gucci shows in the heyday of Tom Ford. In today’s climate, it is far more difficult to promote a black woman than her white counterpart.

“You want to sell the model on the basis of her beauty, not her race,” said Kyle Hagler, an agent at IMG. Yet when he sends models out on casting calls based on what he terms a “beauty perspective,” omitting any mention to potential clients of race, “You always get a call back saying, ‘You didn’t tell me she was black.’”

THE reasons for this may seem obvious, and yet the unconscious bigotry is tricky to pin down.

“I’m not pointing a finger and saying people are racist,” said Ms. Hardison, who nevertheless recounted a recent exchange with the creative director of a major fashion label: “She said to me, ‘I have to be honest with you, when a girl walks in, I just don’t see color.’ Meanwhile, they have one girl, or more likely, none in their show.”

Ms. Hardison explained: “‘I don’t see color?’ Does that mean, you don’t want to see?”

There is something illustrative of the entire issue, and the state of the industry, to be found in this September’s Italian Vogue.

Just one image of a black model appears in the issue, midway through a 17-page article photographed by Miles Aldridge and titled the “Vagaries of Fashion.” In it, the glacial blond Anja Rubik portrays an indolent, overdressed Park Avenue princess with a gilded apartment, a couture wardrobe, two towhead children and a collection of heavy rocks. The sole black model in the pictorial is more modestly attired, in an aproned pinafore.

She plays the maid.

Source : The New York Times