The article in the url link below reports on an interesting project introduced by graduating law students at Stanford (Issues: Diversity—Discrimination, p164; Diversity—Helpful Intent, p168):
“The students are handing out ''diversity report cards'' to the big law firms, ranking them by how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have. … Firms in the top fifth received A's, in the second fifth B's, and so on. Overall grades were arrived at by averaging grades for partners and associates in five categories: women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and gay people.”
As the article notes, this is a strong indication that it is currently a sellers’ market for the students, but it is also an important message for firms that they need to reflect the values of a key stakeholder—their prospective employees. In addition, it seems to me that this, controlling for individual ability, is as good a point of differentiation among their prospective employers as any other the students could come up with:
“The students have ambitious plans, including asking elite schools to restrict recruiting by firms at the bottom of their rankings. They also plan to send the rankings to the general counsels of the Fortune 500 companies with the suggestion that they be used in selecting lawyers.”
This story also reflects a shift in the locus of power from producer to consumer thanks to the free flow of information encouraged by the internet (The Free Flow of Information in a Globalizing World: Figure 3.4, p56). The results of the project are very revealing:
“In New York, a third of the big firms had no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. … Half the firms in Boston had no black partners, and three-quarters no Hispanic ones. The students also found relatively few female partners in New York, ranging from 7 percent at Fulbright & Jaworski to 23 percent at Morrison & Foerster.”
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
In Students' Eyes, Look-Alike Lawyers Don't Make the Grade
By ADAM LIPTAK
914 words
29 October 2007
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
10
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/29bar.html
