According to Diversity, Inc., the most effective way to convey a corporation’s commitment to diversity is to integrate the message through its web site, and in order to signal that diversity is a priority, corporations should place a link that clearly identifies the topic within “one-click” from the homepage. I conducted a study of the web sites of 50 companies on the Fortune to 1) determine if certain corporations signal the importance of diversity within their corporate cultures by placing links within one click on their homepages, 2) to identify whether diverse individuals are used on web pages about diversity to visually communicate a company’s commitment to diversity, and 3) to verify if commonalities can be identified within diversity statements and information on corporate web site. A brief synopsis of my study is below:
Diversity within One Click
Only one company included diversity within “one click” on its homepage. It was Wal-Mart, which was the number one ranked company on the Fortune 500 list in 2005, and it had achieved this ranking an unprecedented four straight times. The company states that it is not just the largest private employer in America, but it is currently “proud to be the largest private employers of African-Americans and Hispanics in the United States.” Since the study was conducted, Wal-Mart revised its web site, and the link is no longer on the home page. One may or not read this as a reflection of its recent legal issues.
Of the 50 companies in the sampling, 12 companies had diversity information within “two-clicks,” 15 companies had diversity within “three-clicks,” five companies did not have a separate link to diversity but had the information listed on their web pages, 15 companies did not have information about diversity on their web sites and two companies had information that fit within the essence of diversity, but did not actually include the search terms. By essence, the researcher means key words and commonalities later identified by analyzing actual diversity statements were located in the information. Eleven of the 15 companies that did not place diversity information on their web sites were listed after the 250th ranking on the Fortune 500 List.
Links to diversity were most often found within two types of web pages. It was mostly linked to pages about employment and general company information. While 13 companies placed their diversity links under pages with a title similar to or using the word “about,” 15 companies included their diversity under links with titles such as “jobs” and “careers.” The remaining companies placed diversity links or information under a varied list of topics, including “global citizenship,” “social responsibility,” “community partnership,” “mission and values,” and “investors.”
Defining Diversity/Difference
Most often, “difference” was seen in terms of age, race, gender, nationality, culture, sexual orientation, physical ability, behavior and creed. “Difference” was also noted in terms of skills, talents, perspectives, experiences, opinions, styles, viewpoints, knowledge and ideas.
Picturing Diversity
In analyzing the 35 web pages with diversity information, it was determined that 21 of those pages included photographs of race or gender minorities, 11 web sites did not include any photographs and two contained images that were graphically manipulated so that the sex or race of the individuals pictured could not be determined. Photographs included racial minorities engaged in some type of action-oriented behavior, such a sitting in a meeting, talking with other individuals or working alone on an experiment or product.
Examples of Diversity on the Internet
