Who are the Consultants?
In 2015 Accenture did something that isn’t common in the consulting industry, they released information on the racial and gender breakdown of their company to the public. They were the first firm in the industry to release this kind of information and few have been this transparent since. The results showed that the consulting industry has not changed more than just their core business models in decades but also the consultants themselves. Examining these figures taken from the Fortune Article which initially reported on these findings back in 2015, it gives a picture of a company with far more uniformity than you would expect from an industry which values creative solutions to unique problems.
The raw percentile difference between men and women indicates there is a lot of work to be done by the company to create a parity of gender. There are many explanations that can be made here for why this is the reality of the company. The talent pool may be favoring this distribution, as can be shows by the average MBA student reported by U.S. News. This could be from the referral networks present from incumbent employees which could be improving overtime. This could even be a statistical fluke, but no real excuse is an acceptable one as even since the turn of the millennium Consulting firms have begun to diversity in other aspects of their applicants, so its about time for them to consider the importance of diversity in the people they hire as much as their diversity in skill.
Since the release of this information over 4 years ago its become very popular for consulting firms to discuss topics of diversity and make goals to reach diversity hiring goals. Its important to ask though, has the Who of consulting really made much of a change since then?
Since this release, Accenture has made a goal for their gender equality, they want to reach a 50/50 gender equality in their company by 2025. In 2017 they achieved a total female workforce of 37%, with a goal of 40% by 2020. At that pace however, they would need to greatly increase their diversity recruitment to achieve their overall goal. This seems to be the same slow growth in the field of racial diversity with a .3 and .1% increase in the companies percentage of Hispanic/Latino and African American employees from 2016–2017. Despite this very slow change, Accenture’s transparency and dedication to changing their workforce is exceptionally admirable, because who a consultant is matters just as much as what they do.
Many other consulting firms have taken notice and made strides to improve who they are as much as what they do. In the 2018 Wall Street Oasis report on the consulting industry, they rank companies such as Bain & Co., BCG, McKinsey, and Accenture as all in the 90th Percentiles for Balanced Racial Diversity. However few besides BCG manage to reach even the 70th percentile for Gender Diversity despite all having goals to reach far higher levels of equity. While continually making strides to correct this systemic disparity in gender in Consulting, they have a long way to go before achieving their goals
In 2018 McKinsey was in the process of determining who will be the next leader of the top consulting firm. Out of all those in the running there was a sole woman and sole person of color — Vivian Hunt, managing partner of the UK and Ireland. In 2015 she co-authored a report by McKinsey titles “Why Diversity Matters”. In this report they indicated dramatic findings on the impact of diversity on business such as “Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.” In a speech she made in Sweden she stated:
It is very rare to find a six-foot-tall, American-African, American-sounding, British female head…of anything, much less McKinsey.
In February 2018, Kevin Sneader was elected as Managing Director for a three year term which started in July of that year.
