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The dire lack of diversity at leadership level in fashion and retail has been well documented. Many companies have tried to tackle the problem, setting recruitment targets and delivering unconscious-bias training to hiring managers, but progress remains slow. Neiman Marcus Group (NMG) is trying a different tack — and the results so far are encouraging.
In the company’s ESG report, published earlier this month, the US owner of department store chains Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman reported that it has already achieved its 2025 goal to increase racial and ethnic diversity in leadership roles (VP and above) to above 21 per cent (achieving 21.4 per cent in 2023, up from 18.2 per cent in 2021, when it set its goal). The next benchmark is 28 per cent by 2030.
To reach this, rather than simply hiring more people of colour, the company has been using a strategy called “bias interruption”, which fixes the biases in hiring, employee engagement and retention by understanding how certain practices deter candidates and employees of colour. Taking a system-based approach means the company doesn’t rely on managers to undo their own biases — something that can be hard to do.
“If you were hoping to increase your sales, you wouldn’t just say, ‘hey, let’s be more open-minded’, you’d put a set of operating practices in place,” explains Eric Severson, chief people and belonging officer at NMG. “You can’t just train your way to [a culture of inclusion and belonging], you have to change the way you operate.”
The company’s approach is by the numbers, but it’s also deeply human. NMG, which employs over 10,000 people, uses the term “belonging” rather than diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) to make it clear that these practices benefit everyone, not just marginalised groups. The company has been steadily building its belonging strategy since the end of 2019, when Severson joined. Experts predict that more companies will follow suit as DE&I becomes increasingly polarising; especially in the US, following the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling that race-based affirmative action could no longer be used in university admissions.
For Severson, the question was how to achieve diversity goals without favouring a candidate because of their race, ethnicity, gender or any other protected characteristic in a hiring or promotion decision. “It’s a challenge because people believe that if you set a goal for leadership diversity, then you’re taking race or ethnicity into account. That’s a fallacy — it’s about interrupting the bias that naturally exists in systems towards minorities and broadening the pool from which you select people.”
How do bias interrupters work?
Severson says NMG’s workforce was already majority female and majority non-white (its current workforce is 67.2 per cent female and 58 per cent racially and ethnically diverse, per its 2023 ESG report). “The issue was how do you create your leadership pipeline and make sure that you provide adequate opportunities for people to advance,” Severson says.
The company set its leadership diversity goal at the VP-and-above level based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which offers insight into the number of employed people by occupation, gender and ethnicity. From there, NMG worked on improving diversity at director level and further down the line, improving retention and progression (typically lacking for underrepresented employees) by mitigating the biases that naturally occur.
As well as using software to ensure the language in job postings is inclusive, the company reaches out to pools of talent via organisations like the National Black MBA Association and the Forté Foundation, and has broadened the group of schools from which it recruits entry-level candidates. It increased the diversity of its merchandising career development programme, by 44 per cent in one year, just by recruiting from a wider variety of schools, says Severson.
Once the talent pool consists of sufficiently qualified candidates, the company uses two evidence-based practices in the selection process. First is a “diverse slate” requirement, meaning that the considered candidates must have a variety of backgrounds. “We require 75 per cent or director-and-above candidate slates that go to hiring managers to have qualified candidates of colour and women in them,” says Severson. “Secondly, we require that 75 per cent of the director-and-above hiring panels, who pick who’s going to get the job, have interviewers of colour and women.”
Experts agree that prioritising skills over past experience is more inclusive, but it’s not always that simple. “People from historically overrepresented groups are hired on potential, and people from historically underrepresented groups are hired on previous achievements because we think that if someone is similar to us, we know how they function,” says Aniela Unguresan, founder of intersectional equity certification system Edge Certification. Any mistake that this “outsider” makes will be amplified, so companies should have safety nets in place to ensure underrepresented employees don’t face unfair scrutiny. One way to build a safety net is by having sponsors who can vouch for and support employees from marginalised backgrounds.
Preventing leaks in the pipeline
In addition to rethinking the hiring process, NMG is making a big push for retention. “It’s not just about building the talent pipeline and having a source [of talent] to start with, there also needs to not be leaks in that pipeline,” says Severson. “Often you recruit people who add diversity to your population and help you produce better products and services, but if you don’t engage and retain them, the leak in your pipeline will be the biggest source of your lack of progress.”
“Recruitment and hiring practices are the default because everyone assumes that’s where racism and bias lives and dies, but that’s the easiest part to tackle,” says Shereen Daniels, managing director of racial equity advisory firm HR Rewired. “One of the exercises we do with an organisation is get them to think about the ways they mitigate the overrepresentation of white employees in senior leadership positions, and what that means for power and decision making.”
The number of junior-level opportunities for underrepresented groups in fashion and beauty is gradually increasing, but it’s still hard to break into the decision-making ranks. Vogue Business speaks to industry leaders about how they’re changing their processes.
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NMG’s internal mobility policy sets out the rules for applying for and getting lateral moves and promotions, including how long you have to be in your job and the steps to progress. All jobs are posted internally to allow employees to apply, and employees are selected using the diverse slate and panel requirement policy. “This makes sure people aren’t just tapping others who are like them on the shoulder to say ‘I want you to work for me’,” says Severson.
“There are some people who have to go through a process to be promoted, and there are some people that just get promoted into roles,” says Daniels. One mistake companies make is assuming there’s a skills gap that can be filled by mentorship, rather than an opportunity gap. “The question I always ask is, if you look at all the people that have been promoted in a year cycle, how many individuals who are not Black and Brown went through the leadership development programme or had to prove themselves on a really challenging project?” she says. “Nine times out of 10 they got promoted without having to do extra work. It’s less about what Black and Brown colleagues are missing, and more about what we can learn from the experiences of our white majority employees who have an easier route to senior leadership positions.”
Microaggressions, such as receiving harsher criticism than those from dominant groups, are among the ways that racism subtly inhibits retention, says Anu Gupta, founder of Be More with Anu, an educational technology company that trains organisations on breaking biases to advance diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
NMG’s Way of Working strategy, rolled out by Severson in 2020, seeks to empower employees to “work wherever, whenever and however they do their best work”, and led to a 4 per cent increase in retention and a 10 per cent improvement in time to hire in 2023 compared to the prior year. In 2023, promotion rates for women and people of colour were consistent year-on-year at 69 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively. NMG’s average engagement score (an indicator of future retention) is 73 out of 100 for all employees, and 74 for employees of colour.
“It’s been well documented and researched that women and people of colour disproportionately leave the workforce when there’s no flexibility,” says Severson. “Our paid leave policy is another example of a bias interrupter that levels the playing field to allow women, people of colour and people with disabilities to stay in the workforce and advance rather than having to leave when they need to care for someone.”
Pay equity at every level has also been implemented, which experts agree is an essential part of the way employees feel valued and respected. “If you want to keep people of colour and women, you need to show them that if they work at your organisation, they’re going to be paid the same as a man or someone who’s white,” says Severson.
Changing systems and behaviours takes practice, says Gupta. “It’s why there’s [still] a common aphorism that marginalised people have to work twice as hard to get half as far.”
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