When diversity and ideology collide
President-elect Joe Biden has made assembling a diverse team a priority. He also faces pressure from the progressive wing of his party to limit corporate influence on hires for his administration, avoiding candidates from Wall Street or company boardrooms. But narrowing the candidate pool that way won’t help create a more representative administration, some suggest.
“Big Business is here to help,” said Ron Parker, the chief executive of the National Association of Securities Professionals. He told DealBook that women and people of color in business have “a unique experience that lends itself to being heard.” This week, the N.A.S.P. and seven other trade groups sent a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to prioritize diversity in top economic policy positions and to “reject demands for a blanket exclusion on potential appointees with experience in the corporate sector or financial services field specifically.”
Roger Ferguson, one of the most prominent Black executives in the financial industry, just announced his retirement as the C.E.O. of TIAA. He is on the short list for Treasury secretary (more on that below), and gets Mr. Parker’s support.
Research on racial diversity among financial regulators makes for uncomfortable reading. Of the 327 federal financial agency posts requiring congressional confirmation over the years, only 10 appointees have been Black, according to a recent report by Chris Brummer at the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown. When DealBook spoke to Professor Brummer last month, he said those findings had received a lot of attention, perhaps because no one ever quantified the lack of diversity in this way before. He has since been named a member of Mr. Biden’s Treasury Department advisory review team.
The obstacle to more diverse hiring “is not the skill set, it’s the relationships,” said Petal Walker of the law firm WilmerHale, formerly a chief counsel at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. People tend to hire those with whom they golf or grab a drink, she told DealBook, so it will take “intentional action” to break down established cliques.
The calls to reject corporate candidates ignore U.S. history, said Paul Thornell, a former Senate and White House staff member, of the lobbying firm Mehlman Castagnetti. The generational wealth gap created by a long history of discrimination leaves fewer people of color able to afford taking jobs in government or nonprofits. “Groups from the far left throw out edicts,” he told DealBook, “but these don’t reflect the realities of the American experience or inequality, the racial wealth gap, and may prove counterproductive to diversify the administration and to implement policies that work for all Americans.”