Foundation Staffs Do Not Reflect Diversity of U.S. Population, Report Says

Despite an increase over the past two decades in the number of women and members of minority

groups who work for foundations, most of the nation’s grant makers do not yet adequately reflect the ethnic diversity of the general U.S. population, according to a new report by the Joint Affinity Groups, a national coalition of grant makers who are members of minority groups.

What’s more, foundations rarely recognize the disabled or homosexuals when determining whether their staffs are diverse, says the report.

The report notes some gains in hiring women and blacks, Hispanics, and other minority-group members.

Nearly two in three foundation employees in 1998 were women, an increase of nearly 33 percent over 1986, when one in every two foundation staff members were female.

Minorities experienced greater growth rates in hiring, the report notes. Only 13 percent of grant makers’ professional staffs in 1984 were made up of members of minority groups; in 1998, that number increased to 19 percent — a growth rate of nearly 50 percent.

But the increase in numbers is tempered by the relative lack of women and minority-group members who hold leadership or board positions at foundations. For example, the report found little difference in minority representation on foundation boards in 1992 and in 1998. In addition, even though the numbers of minority-group members who serve as chief executives at foundations grew more than threefold from 1982, they still represented only 6 percent of all chief executives in 1998.

Although approximately half of all chief executive jobs were held by women in 1998, females made up only 28 percent of board members.

“What this shows us is that we haven’t made any real progress,” says Emmett D. Carson, head of the Minneapolis Foundation and author of the report’s foreword. Mr. Carson, who is black, adds: “It really says this is a tougher problem for our field for reasons we either haven’t yet imagined or managed to articulate.”

Impact on Grant Making

The continuing gulf between minority representation at foundations and the number of blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities in the population may threaten the effectiveness of grants to those groups, the report warns. Leaders of the Joint Affinity Groups said they plan to conduct research to examine the impact of foundation diversity on grant-making decisions.

The report, called “The Meaning and Impact of Board and Staff Diversity in the Philanthropic Field,” also found that minority women typically earn less money and are less likely to move into leadership positions than their white counterparts. Women employees, including whites, earned less and made fewer grant-making decisions than men.

Gay men and lesbians earned less than heterosexuals, and lesbians were less likely to move into high-ranking posts, the report says.

Nearly 36 percent of heterosexual women reported making $70,000 or more a year at foundation jobs, while only 20 percent of lesbians surveyed reported earning that much. Among heterosexual men, 65 percent said they earned $70,000 or more annually, compared with 49 percent of gay men.

Advocates for gays and lesbians say the report is the first to comprehensively examine how homosexuals and people with disabilities fare as employees of foundations.

Members of the Joint Affinity Groups are organizations that represent grant makers and others who are concerned about encouraging diversity in philanthropy.

The study, conducted over the last four years, collected information from 600 grant makers through surveys and interviews. It was financed with grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, in New York, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, in San Francisco.

Free copies of the report can be downloaded at http://www.mcf.org/mcf/resource/JAGreport.htm.