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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Well, let's bring in Jeff Green. He's Bloomberg News Management and diversity reporter. He joins us from Detroit. Hey, Jeff, good to have you on. It's always good to talk to you. You know, Carol and I've been doing this together for over five years. What we used to have you on the program, the conversations were a lot different. It was about, Okay, these are the companies, these are these are the this is the makeup of the com of the workforce of a certain company. These are the
goals that a company has put out there. You guys were the ones that were crunching the numbers and seeing if the companies were actually meeting those standards. Your beat in recent years has really shifted with the way that I think a lot of corporate America and politics have shifted.
Before we get to the individual stories that we want to talk to you about, can you just talk a little bit about even though your title is the same, the way that you cover management and diversity in this environment has changed completely.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting each of these situations. You're kind of watching companies be pushed and pulled into directions they're not necessarily comfortable with. It's kind of like this process where they start out, you know, resisting talking about the diversity of the workforces and not wanting to share, and then they're sharing it all and they're headlong in one direction, and then now where we are now, they're sort of trying to find their way back towards something
undo some of what they've done. So they're in this weird position that it's really hard as a corporate CEO to figure out where you settle in where you stay out of trouble, Like what's the least risk position to take, and clearly they've been wrong repeatedly.
Yeah, it's really tricky, and I know that we've talked to various leaders, Jeff, and they're saying, you know, we got to think about our own employee base and the culture of our company and what employees expect, especially a younger employee. Having said that, let's get into this story that you put out. We've been talking about it in the newsroom. It involves Jeff on and what happened to him and what he learned tell us a little bit about his story.
Yeah, I mean, initially we thought we should just write a story about our more white men suing and what does that mean. And part of the problem is it's really difficult to determine that we don't really have a good sense of what kind of court cases are happening and who's making them. Grace is not something automatically gathered. So as we were kind of talking to these guys and looking at it though, and even looking at the cases, it became clear it's interesting. They're really no different than
anyone who takes on corporate HR. You stand up and you say you think something is wrong, and then you cease to have work and that you know. So at the same time we're talking about how there's this push for more white guys to show up, there's also the same reality that the system is maybe broken by which we hold corporate HR accountable for how they are treating their employees.
So what did you find when you initially wanted to go out and write this story about this demographic that is suing. What did you find?
Well, I mean, clearly there's more permission as a white male to say I feel like I was discriminated against than there was, you know, in twenty twenty, and for a large segment or you know, significant segment of the population. It's still kind of an insulting proposition. But there's also been a lot of sort of I don't know, soul searching on this topic. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously basically there's no such thing as reverse discrimination and people need
to stop thinking that way. And I mean not just a unanimous decision, but written by the minority of the court. So it's like been the shift toward trying to think about these in a different way. We're talking about belonging instead of diversity. We're doing all these sort of shifts in approach to try to get to something that is somehow less controversial and moves us forward. And I don't think we've come even close to figuring out what that
looks like. Yeah, but clearly there's chaos and struggle as we try to do that.
I love though this stat you know, it's this is this is a great story for like debate and just conversation. You say, so, here's here's a white man who sued for discrimination. But as you remind us in the story men still white men are discriminated against our guests, some of the claims of that white men are discriminated against our confounding men still make up ninety percent of chief executive officers of S and P five hundred companies, largely white.
I would kind of add, I think, based on research as well as about three quarters of all C suite employees and the proportion of black men are when men who have held the top job is extremely small, currently hovering at about one percent. But to be fair, and I think we try to figure out what's going on in society Jeff, that there is a younger or white male population that feels like they have been left behind.
I know people who feel that way, who had opportunities and so on and so forth, but things just didn't work out, and they feel like, wait a minute. You know, society was supposed to promise me certain things if I did this, and it didn't happen. So is there something to this that there are some white men with the rise of diversity issues that maybe were left at I'm not quite sure how to deal with this.
Well. The challenge is that what we see when we look at the S and P five hundred CEOs, and we look at the c suite, we're seeing the past. Those are the men who got ahead when things were different. Yeah, where people like Jeff Vaughn come from is in the messier spot where things are actually changing and shifting more than you can see. The demographic of the whole country is changing where you can't really see it because you
see those powerful white faces. And so it's hard when you see those powerful white faces to really recognize that there's something else happening at people who are closer to where the churn is. It still doesn't say that, like if you're a black woman, you know you're not in a worse situation. There's no, no, no, I'm not trying to say that. I'm just saying there is something happening.
As you said, you know, the stay at home sons, the neats that not employed, educated or in training, young men who are having a different lived experience, but you can't see them. What you see is what ten, fifteen, twenty years of power for white men allowed to happen. And so that's what makes it hard for people.
It's fascinating. You do also say that President Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, co founder of America First Legal. It's a conservative not for profit, is representing Vaughan and other white men in cases against companies including Meta, IBM, and sheell so a lot. More on this story head to The Bloomberger Bloomberg dot Com. Jeff Green, thank you so much, Bloomberg News Management University reporter, Glad we could get to this story.