University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

A few weeks later, William's was surprised to learn that his experience isn't uncommon. When talking with a friend, who also is a white male, he discovered that something similar had happened to him. In inquiring about a job, the friend was told that the company wanted to hire a minority, but the right candidate hadn't yet been found. So the recruiter encouraged him to send in a resume anyway.

"The goal of affirmative action, the EEOC, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act was that people would be judged and hired solely on their qualifications for the job. Race and gender would become a non-issue in employment," says William's, who is 36. "It's ironic that almost 30 years later, it's kind of flipped the other way.

"I'm not bitter; it's just reality. If you're any sort of thinking person, you understand the motivations, the good intentions behind it," he says. "But, right now, society and business are trying to correct 100 years of wrongs in one generation. We're paying for the sins of our fathers.

William's articulates an often-heard lament. It's one facet of the thorny question regarding white males in today's corporate environment: How do you ameliorate past inequities toward women and minorities without penalizing and embittering another very important component of the work force?

Even more complex, if you ask four white males about their experience in the workplace today you'll get four entirely different answers. One will give you William's' answer. Another will complain about "strategic" hires and unfair practices benefiting women and minorities for summer jobs and promotions. An third will explain that he now feels more comfortable revealing his parental responsibilities and will recount lunches with female colleagues during which time they talked about balancing work and family. A fourth may admit to confusion and discomfort at having to manage and mentor people of different backgrounds.

This isn't an easy period for white males or the human resources professionals who must manage them. American men recently have been described as "troubled" and "restless," searching for answers. "What Do Men Really Want"? was the cover story of the June 24, 1991 Newsweek and Robert Bly's Iron John (which some dub the manual of the men's movement) was on the best seller list for 30 weeks.

What's going on?

In the workplace several factors are coalescing: In corporate America's attempt to downsize, management levels have compressed: at the same time more people are primed to move up the corporate ladder. There are fewer jobs, not more, and this comes just at the time when a greater awareness of diversity issues is suffering. Many white males are coming to terms with the realization that they may not be able to achieve what their fathers had, or what they themselves expected to achieve just a few years ago.

In fact, talk to human resources experts, and you'll get a conflict of opinions: It's easier on younger men who have been schooled with women and minorities and have more realistic expectations of today's business eliminate; no, it's easier on older men who aren't directly competing in this intense environment; yes, white males have legitimate gripes; no, men have selected perception (they choose to notice the jobs that white males lose and ignore the hard work of women and minorities who are promoted).

No one really knows.

Although it's obvious that white males are still the dominant culture in numbers and power, and in organizational settings it's this very culture that needs to be altered to effectively accommodate other groups progressive human resources experts are looking at white males in a new way: Have some of their needs been left out of the diversity quotient? And, how can companies address their concerns without minimizing the problems of minorities and women?

"The sense I get right now is that white males are somewhat frustrated," says Clifford M. Koen Jr., assistant professor of business law at the University of New Orleans and a human resources manager in various businesses for 10 years.

In recent years there's been an unprecedented explosion of issues concerning worker rights: wrongful discharge, defamation, privacy, discrimination and reverse discrimination. This wave of employee rights issues had hit employers right between he eyes and the white male has found his rights overshadowed. Concerns for the white male simply haven't been factored into the workplace equation."

An outspoken champion of women's and minority rights for many years, Koen believes that men just want a level playing field precisely what women and minorities have wanted in the past.

"I think we're on the bring of seeing a greater awareness on the part of employers to address the needs of all employees, including the white males, as far a equality. With the cutbacks we're seeing in the work force today, employers are going to have to deal with this issue; they can't put it off any longer. The rights of white males are being stepped on as much as those of anyone else."

It brings us to the question: Where do white males fit in? Are they being treated fairly? Have we been defining diversity too narrowly? Indeed, experts in the area of diversity are wrangling with this notion. In fact, R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., executive director of the American Institute for Managing Diversity Inc. at Morehouse College in Atlanta, believes this is the new wave of this issue.

He offers the following metaphor. Consider a jar of balls. They're all red. Then we inject green balls and yellow balls. The way we normally define diversity, the green and yellow balls would be labeled diverse. "We argue that the real diversity is the mixture of the red, yellow and green balls," says Thomas. "If you define it that way, you're talking about whoever is in your work force. It's a multi-dimensional mixture."

In the U.S. we've focused primarily on race and gender, he says, but there are infinite other possibilities, such as age, tenure with the organization, educational background, functional background, union, non-union or sexual orientation. "It isn't that we've failed to manage diversity," he says. "It's that we haven't even placed it on the agenda. Until we do that, we're going to be caught in this cycle of excluding people - focusing on one group and not focusing on another."

One of the Institute's goals is to learn more about the white males' perspective so that it can operationalize the notion that managing diversity includes everyone, even white males, in an attempt to create an environment that works for everybody.

Creating this type of environment is indeed a challenge. Most companies have approached the diversity issue as getting ready to accommodate minorities and women As a result, there's defensiveness, concern and backlash on the part of white men, says Thomas. Some of the blame can be placed on the approach many businesses have taken to the diversity challenge.

Just ask Patricia Pope, executive vice president of Pope & Associates Inc. in Cincinnati, personnel diversity consultants since the early 1970s. "I think it's safe to say that white males typically have the power and the control in most organizational settings. So, if you want to affect change, you somehow have to change their minds set. You have to show them it's their self-interest.

Furthermore, some mistakes have been made during the past years. "Well-intentional companies and managers without really understanding what it was they were trying to accomplish, simply wanted to meet some things worse," says Pope.

She refers to the possibility of lowered standards because of external pressures to meet hiring targets, without differentiating well between candidates. It creates a great deal of resentment among other employees. Says Pope, "Most employees would say they are for equal opportunity as long as there's fairness. If they perceive things as being done unfairly, that's when they feel resentment."

For example, one of Pope's clients had a policy that any promotion above a specific level in that company had to be signed off by a vice president, if it was someone other than a woman or a minority. This kind of policy has the potential for disastrous consequences because it gives the impressing that everyone isn't being treated equally.

Another example is in the area of mentioning. Most organizations recognize mentioning as an important part of the developmental process, especially as people move into higher levels. Oftentimes, however, women and minorities don't develop those relationships in which they could get mentioning as easily as a white male would.

"Some well-intentioned companies recognize the problem and decide to give them mentors," explains Pope. "They identify their high-potential candidates and identify the vice presidents as in their organization. They assign a woman or a minority to each vice president and tell what person that it's his or her job to mentor the individual and at the end of two years, they want the individual ready to be promoted into a director-level position."

The potential problems are obvious. There may be no natural chemistry, no bonding. They're just trying to get through the hour. At the end of the two years, not only are these women and minorities not ready to be promoted to director level positions, but many are worse off then when they started because of the resentment that it created among their peers. It defines the basic process of mentioning, in which an individual sees something in someone that reminds him of himself and makes a personal commitment and investment of time in that person's development.

Although Pope believes these in stances are uncommon, these well-intentional but misguided organizations can create major problems. A company could use affirmative action in this way and call it diversity. And basically, if we call this diversity, in five years, diversity will have the same bad name that affirmative action has now," says Pope.

The mentoring issue, however, is also a good example of the many situations in which white males can relate to the issues that concern women and minorities. The bottom line on diversity, says Pope, is that if diversity programs are as effective as they should be, white males should be some of the biggest benefactors because everyone profits from an inclusive attitude. "If white males aren't benefiting from diversity efforts, then there's something wrong with those efforts," she says.

For example, some white males, like women and minorities, have poor managers. Sometimes their careers get side-tracked, because they aren't being effectively developed. They can benefit from better career pathing, improved feedback in the environment and improved performance appraisals. Again, diversity relates to white males as well.

According to Thomas, corporations always have had diversity, even when there were only white males. "In the past, these individuals have suppressed their diversity: age, lifestyle preference, priorities with respect to families."

In fact, at one meeting, a 65-year old white male came up to Thomas and told him he resented it when people said that they didn't have diversity until minorities and women appeared in significant numbers. "We've always had diversity," he told Thomas, "but we've always had to suppress it. Because we've suppressed it, we're having race and gender issues."

How then can white males be factored into today's definitions of diversity? As complicated as this issue is, it's solution is even more so, because no one is quite sure what men want. The push to accommodate women and minorities, combined with the fact that white males still dominate the corporate sector, in terms of numbers and management power , may make it seem as if they don't have a right to speak up about what their concerns or needs are.

Consequently, little is being done with white males specifically in mind, but the brunt of this task will undoubtedly fall on the shoulders of the human resources department. The solution, according to Joan Green, director of affirmative action at Chicago-based Quaker Oats, my lie in how diversity programs are communicated to all employees, including white males.

"I think white males who have been people in the power positions may perceive themselves as potentially losing something," says Green. "We need to care for them, as well as women and minorities, in a positive way, to be careful that we don't represent to them that we value them less than anybody else. As contributors presently and potentially, their ability to grow and develop in our workplace is valued. That's a very important part of the message."

Until this point, the programs that human resources departments have developed in response to diversity are geared toward women and minorities. A classic example (although males of any race can relate to it) is the issue of balancing work and family responsibilities. Like women, some men may be hesitant to take advantage of work and family benefits for fear of being placed on a "Daddy Track." Companies have made an effort to assist employees in this area through extended family leaves or flexible work schedules, yet it's unusually the women who are able to take advantage of these programs.

A step in the right decision would be for companies to look at male needs with regard to work and family issues. And indeed, some companies, such as Du Pont, have begun doing this. A 1990 study by Du Pont revealed that men are interested in flexible work hours and sick child leave policies, that men and women were equal in the percentage who decline jobs requiring relocation and heavy travel, and that 40% of the men had considered another employer who offers more job flexibility.

Another solution is offering programs that are geared specifically toward men. This is the approach the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has taken. Among other progressive programs, it offers a fathering course that has proven to be popular.

St. Louis-based Monsanto Chemical Co. took a positive step forward in its approach this year when it named tom Cummins, a white male, as its manager of diversity development. "It was an interesting phenomenon because there was no defensiveness and no need to apologize for placing a white male in that position," says Nancy Ghenn, Monsanto's director of human resources for finance and planning (and formerly manager of personnel planning and work force diversity.)

This sends out the message that white males can be fair, too. In addition, the involvement of white males in managing diversity perhaps could have the greatest effect in changing their attitudes toward the subject, especially in the area of selective perception. As Pope points out, during their careers, most men have lost promotions they thought they should have had to other people. "But with diversity in the workplace, it's much easier to say. "I didn't get the job because of special treatment to a woman or minority." says Pope.

The companies most successful at managing diversity have found that once fear and resentment are removed, white males indeed have found diversity to be a positive factor in the workplace. Such was the case for Burke Stinson, district manager of AT & T media relations. In 1973, Stinson recalls that there was an affirmative action agreement between AT & T and the government, which said it wasn't enough to simply hire women and minorities. Rather, the company had to hire and promote, thereby opening up the "fast tract" to a much broader scope of people.

"It was quite a human reaction for many white males to interpret that as meaning that some women and minorities would be moved up faster than some white men," says Stinson. "There was grumbling over coffee and at water coolers. There was a 'show me' attitude for some, and perhaps some despair by some men who thought their careers weren't moving as fast as they wanted and now would be slowed further."

However, with the company's valiant attempt to manage diversity, the tension began to build, as more white males began to see qualified, competent women and minorities move up based on abilities. Since the breakup of AT & T in 1984, the company lost more than 100,000 people. It became a matter of survival as well as promotion.

"I think white men felt in their bones that a company isn't going to show favored treatment to less-than qualified people in times like this. It was a time when everyone was trying to survive the challenges and dangers the company faced. It brought people of all races, creeds and colors, and both genders together under the umbrella of surviving and thriving. Some of that resentment and anxiety evaporated because everyone's talent became the focus," says Stinson.

"You become very pragmatic when the shop you're sailing begins to hit rough seas. You don't care if the members of the crew are white or women. If they're doing this job, if they can help save the ship, that's what you really care about."

As with most of the changes that have taken place in the work force, the issue of white males and diversity won't be solved anytime soon. In fact, Thomas says it could take 15, even 25 years, before diversity is managed s effectively that affirmative action won't be necessary. "You're talking about major changes in the way that we think," he says. "But if we can get to the point at which we tap the potential of everyone, avoid fracturing the organization and obtain the full potential of all employees, it can't be anything but a positive change for corporate America."

Charlene Marmer Solomon is a free-lance writer.

Personnel Journal 11/91 p.88