‘Black women potentially suffer a double burden of bias that keeps them from the uppermost levels of corporate leadership’.

This is according to a January 2018 report (pdf) from McKinsey and Company. This report tackles the business case and provides a perspective on how to take action on inclusion and diversity to impact growth and business performance.

This work sheds light on how companies can use diversity as an enabler of business impact.

It also articulates a clear opportunity for companies to promote inclusion and diversity in senior decision-making roles, and specifically in line roles on executive teams.

The report finds:

The statistically significant correlation between a more diverse leadership team and financial outperformance demonstrated three years ago continues to hold true on an updated, enlarged, and global data set
Companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability and 27% more likely to have superior value creation
Companies in the top-quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading profitability
Overall, companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/ cultural diversity were 29% less likely to achieve above-average profitability than were all other companies in McKinsey and Company’s data set.
Read the full report (pdf).