This year’s Women’s Foodservice Forum conference in Orlando, Fla., was another great experience. It was the result of a lot of women—and men—making sacrifices and doing a lot of brilliant planning and hard work. I do indeed love being a part of the foodservice industry.
The special, invitation-only Top-to-Top sessions for foodservice industry senior executives were an excellent idea. But I have an unsettling feeling with regard to the presentation that the WFF commissioned Diversity Inc. to develop on minority women in executive positions in the industry.
The topic is one that needs to be addressed. I agree fully with the WFF and the presenter that the time has come—even if the racially charged Don Imus incident wasn’t top-of-mind—to discuss the lack of black women holding executive positions in our industry.
I also agree with an attendee’s comment that including companies with 13-percent diversity representation in their executive echelons is a sad testament to a “best practices” rank. The data presented was not a surprise to me, not even the zero-percent score for one part of our industry. Nor do I doubt that the data was a surprise to others in the room. After all, there were only about 10 black women among the 300-plus executives in attendance. And a few of those black women were entrepreneurs or held the position of director of diversity for their companies, which is almost a given.
For the past 20 years I’ve experienced being the only black woman—or black person for that matter—from an agency representing clients at every industry function that I’ve attended. And for the more than 30-plus clients I’ve serviced in that time, I’ve never worked with a black person who was an executive for that client.
There have been times when peers ask me about the lack of black people in the industry. I remember a group of attendees at the National Restaurant Association’s Marketing Executives Group conference approaching me, the sole black person in attendance, and asking me why black marketing directors of foodservice manufacturers and operators didn’t attend this conference. My answer was, “Possibly because there are none.”
I explained that I was attending as a representative on behalf of a client, not because I held an executive marketing position with a foodservice manufacturer or an operator. Their first reaction was surprise, then thoughtfulness, and then they all slowly nodded their heads and looked at one another as if to say, “Now that I think about it, she’s right.”
The surprise of Diversity Inc.’s presentation was that those of us attending the session had no prior knowledge that it was going to address the topic of women of color. Nor were any of the attendees, including those companies that participated in the research, privy to the results before they were announced in that session. Needless to say, some people in the room were uncomfortable with the presentation. And it was very noticeable that many did not return after the break for the second half of the session.
As I had during the Imus situation, I thought: “Where is the publicity person? It’s crisis communications and issues management time.”
Why wasn’t the presentation made in a WFF conference general session so a broader group would be privy to the results of the research? Has the data presented in that Top-to-Top session been released to trade media? If more in our industry knew about the research findings, wouldn’t there be a greater opportunity for the issue to be addressed?
One of my concerns is that the segment of foodservice responsible for communicating our industry’s image was not included—trade publications and marketing communications agencies. Another of my concerns was the “solutions” section of the presentation. I was particularly concerned with the recommendation to form a committee made up of senior-executive-level women of color to work top-to-top to “correct” the issue when the research showed that there are few to no black women in executive-level positions. In those instances, does the chief executive draw from women of color in middle management? That would be my recommendation—to invest in training and promoting these women. Or does the company hire a diversity consultant? Or target an executive-level black woman from another industry?
Ultimately, the foodservice industry has its work cut out for itself. The research may be embarrassing to some, especially the participants. But ultimately it is a reflection of the industry overall, not just the separate companies or segments represented. Women in our industry have been the objects of discrimination, and African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Muslim women, and women in other ethnic groups, have been the object of even greater discrimination. These are qualitative and quantitative facts.
After the presentation and question-and-answer session, the group at my table discussed some of the data presented and the challenge of finding and placing black women in executive-level positions. One of the male CEOs at my table said the only way to correct that kind of problem is to “just do it.”
Several studies have proved that greater profitability results when ethnic diversity in executive-level positions is ensured. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the righteous thing to do. So, industry leaders, both men and women, operators, distributors, manufacturers, brokers, trade media, and agencies, let’s do just that.
Creola A. Kizart-Hampton is the president of GreaterWorks! Marketing Inc. in Chicago.