Jono Lai

Bored of Directors - A look at systemic racism in the Fortune 100

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A Look at Systemic Racism in the Fortune 100. This is a non-partisan analysis of the most powerful companies in the United States and their elected Board of Directors. Whose interests do they represent?

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Jono Lai
I am an Australian and have been living abroad for the last 10 years and have returned home to Brisbane from New York last month. During mandatory hotel quarantine, I started working on a side project that was close to my heart and to learn HTML/CSS. As a foreigner in the United States, I found it challenging to show solidarity and support after the killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement and thought adding a black square to social media was a cop-out. As a founder, I wanted to contribute by building something meaningful and data driven to highlight systemic racism across the most powerful companies in the country. I firmly believe corporations have the greatest influence on government and policy and if diversity was a priority, it needed to start from the top. If it resonates with you, please share on the internet and upvote. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback and I hope we can help facilitate conversations to create lasting change at the highest level.
Rob Modzelewski
The graphic is simple and solid. Good job there. I think you've jumped the gun with the sub-title though. I think something like "exploration of gender/ethnic distribution amongst Board of Directors" would be more appropriate. The reason being that you haven't demonstrated the analysis, legwork, or data that warrants the conclusion that your title espouses. The sub-title implies that a discrepancy between population distribution of gender and ethnicity and distribution of these traits amongst board of directors must be racist, and more so "systemically" racist. However that is a very big leap of logic. You'd need a much more thorough analysis to determine anything of the kind. This is basically step 1 of a many step process. Some other things you'd need to look at: 1. Why do people get named to a board of directors? What is the process? Criteria? Reasons? 2. You'd certainly need to do a multifactorial analysis trying to separate out variables and then control for them. There could be dozens or hundreds of significant variables. You don't know without doing the analysis. The sub-title implies a big jump, the same kind that would manifest if you were to look at the NBA (overwhelmingly black) and declare "the NBA is systemically racist against whites, asians, and hispanics" or nursing jobs and declare "nursing is an example of systemic anti-male genderism" or look at construction workers and declare gender discrimination against males. End distributions only imply some kind of difference (or more likely differences (plural)) somewhere along the way, they don't imply what those differences are. It's a starting point for analysis not an end. I would suggest amending the copy or otherwise expanding the analysis. My two cents.