How Committed to Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Is Your Favorite Running Brand?
A note from Executive Director Kiera Smalls
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. That year, many corporations publicly denounced injustices taking place against Black people in the U.S. and committed funds and resources to address much-needed systemic changes. That year was also the year the Running Industry Diversity Coalition (RIDC) was created to help ingrain racial justice into the running industry.
At the RIDC, our mission is to unite the running industry by providing resources, measuring progress, and holding the industry accountable to equitable employment, leadership, and ownership positions and improving the inclusion, visibility, and access for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). But we must know where we currently are to know where we are going together.
If you are new here, the RIDC is conducting a series of baseline research studies focused on the employment, access, inclusion, and belonging of underrepresented racial groups in the running industry. You can learn about each study on our website.
In addition to our research findings, we have plenty of other areas of interest and action necessary to achieve our mission. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some of our deep dives on our website for you to consider or act on.
First up: Let’s get into the information brands share about their racial justice and/or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and the impact of their efforts. Transparency among brands differs; this piece asks “what can you know?” using the lens of a consumer.
Story by Allison Torres Burtka for the Running Industry Diversity Coalition
With contributions from Kiera Smalls and Betsy Rathwell
Many runners want to support brands that share their values—including those related to racial and social justice.
But how can a consumer know whether a brand is simply issuing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements or whether it is truly dedicated to change? We were curious to find out how runners could learn about their favorite brands and know which companies have made meaningful commitments and are working toward them. In some cases, brands may make pronouncements about DEI and social justice but not go much further, or they may set goals but not do the work necessary to achieve them. Perhaps they are making progress, but they avoid discussing it openly out of fear of saying the wrong thing or making mistakes.
In a 2022 survey of consumers by Amazon Ads, 67 percent of respondents said it was important that the brands they buy from take action on DEI. Forty-five percent said they were willing to pay more for a product that reflects and promotes DEI.
A brand’s commitment to DEI initiatives shows up in many places: its marketing materials, ambassadors, public statements, whether the company has an executive leader in charge of DEI, supplier diversity, hiring practices, overall employee diversity, and, perhaps most important, the diversity of its C-suite and board of directors.
Sometimes, data on diversity is available in a company’s annual, sustainability, or corporate social responsibility report. Some companies publish annual DEI reports, but only about 1 in 6 Fortune 500 companies do.
In certain industries, scorecards or surveys provide DEI data on multiple companies. For example, the Automotive Diversity Scorecard assesses automakers’ diversity efforts. In the restaurant industry, the National Restaurant Association’s DEI survey report looks at the effectiveness of DEI practices.
When brands don’t make DEI information publicly available, consumers look to other indicators of the company’s commitment to DEI work. In the running industry in particular, the faces consumers associate with the brand are often its ambassadors.
We took a look at what DEI information several running brands publicly report on their ambassadors, boards of directors, and employees.
Ambassadors
In the running industry, a brand’s sponsored athletes or ambassadors serve as its public representatives. These are the people the brand chooses to uplift and promote, and their diversity is of interest to consumers.
Many brands promote their ambassadors publicly but don’t quantify or report their diversity. For a consumer, the next best way to gauge the diversity of a brand’s ambassadors is often to see their photos (although photos don’t tell a complete story of how each athlete identifies).
Brands with elite athlete teams include Altra, On, Brooks, and HOKA. On the amateur athlete ambassador side, teams include Rabbit’s RADrabbits and Brooks Run Happy Team. Brooks was the only brand whose athletes or ambassadors we found diversity statistics for: Brooks reported that 46 percent of its Run Happy Team identified as BIPOC in 2022, a 12-point increase year over year.
“The ambassador is the external view of an organization—it’s what they are promoting,” but it doesn’t necessarily show you what’s happening inside a brand, says diversity and inclusion expert and consultant Jocelyn Giangrande, MA, SPHR, CCDP, SHRM-SCP.
However, ambassadors are not just the public face of a brand—some ambassadors also have internal influence on the company. “Brands will miss out on an opportunity if they only use an ambassador as an external promotion, from a visibility perspective, and not use that ambassador’s diverse experience, perspectives, ideas, thoughts, solutions,” Giangrande says.
Employees & Board
Some brands are more transparent than others about the diversity of their board of directors. In the running industry, Brooks provides more publicly accessible information on DEI than many other brands do. The Brooks 2022 Corporate Responsibility Performance Report states that its Board of Advisors is 67 percent white and 33 percent Asian. The company has committed to achieving at least 30 percent BIPOC employee representation in the U.S. at every level, which it has surpassed for its individual contributors and board, but its senior manager/director/senior director level is 16.7 percent BIPOC.
Brooks reports areas where it has achieved goals and areas where it needs to catch up. Its VP/SVP/C-suite level is 100 percent white.
The Brooks report notes where the brand has room for growth: “The racial underrepresentations of Hispanic/Latinx and Native American/Alaska Native employees represent our greatest opportunity for outreach, recruiting, and hiring. Based on our 2022 results, and to increase diverse representation at all levels, we will heighten our focus on BIPOC employee retention and the internal development of women and BIPOC talent for leadership roles.”
Many brands provide less information. Sometimes they announce their goals for diversity in boards and employees—but not current numbers on racial diversity. Or they report BIPOC representation data for all employees but not specifically for the board or senior executives. Others don’t provide DEI information on their companies, but their parent companies do.
For example, Smartwool’s Social Impact Roadmap specifies goals for 2025, including 25 percent BIPOC representation in total employee population and leadership.
In its 2021 Impact Progress Report, On reported the increase in people of color in its North America team. The increase was 6.8 percent for the overall team and 8.9 percent for people with at least one direct report.
Saucony apparently doesn’t provide DEI data for its brand specifically. Still, the broader Wolverine Worldwide Global Impact Report says that its senior management team’s “ethnic diversity” was 14 percent in 2021, 20 percent in 2020, and 16 percent in 2019.
Deckers Brands, which includes HOKA, reported in its Deckers FY22 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report that 21 percent of its director-level and above employees in the U.S. were BIPOC. That was a 9 percent increase since fiscal year 2020.
How much DEI data a brand makes public may have something to do with how far along it is in its racial justice work.
“In my experience, if they have a good story to tell, they will share that information. If they feel they have opportunities, they’re much more reluctant to do that,” Giangrande says.
Because the number of people on a board of directors is typically much smaller than the number of a company’s total employees, brands may believe that bringing in more racially diverse board members will be a challenge. But Giangrande says that, in her experience, “there tend to be opportunities for that, and a lot of organizations realize that that is something that is an expectation, especially over the last two to three years. There is some expectation that board representation is critical, from a diversity perspective.”
Companies may struggle to introduce more diverse board members because “they tend to go to the same well, and a lot of times, this is not something that is even on a conscious level,” Giangrande says. “Sometimes they get stuck in paradigms of what type of background or experience they’re looking for, and then they feel they can’t find the diversity that they’re looking for.”
But that may be changing. “What I’m starting to find now, because some organizations are really trying to commit, or there’s pressure for them to commit, is that they’re actually starting to change their criteria for [board members], being a little bit more flexible, more adaptable to the changing times,” Giangrande says.
Other Indicators
Another way to assess how committed a company is to its DEI work is to hear what employees have to say, Giangrande says, through platforms such as Comparably, which provide employee perspectives. “The company will say one thing, with marketing materials and all of that, but what are the people who are on the inside actually saying? Because they’re the ones who have to navigate in the organization,” and they may say how inclusive and equitable they feel it is, she says.
Giangrande recalls instances when companies have appeared to be doing all the right things from an external perspective, including having a diverse board and recruiting diverse talent. “If you were just looking at it from the outside, you would say, yeah, they checked all the important boxes, but in actuality, they were very exclusive, very discriminatory in their practices,” she says. The external perspective can be misleading.
Also, if a brand has someone at the executive level who is leading DEI, that may signal that it is doing the necessary work. “Most organizations who are progressive in DEI tend to have an executive in that role,” Giangrande says.
Gender diversity may also signal how deep the company’s DEI commitment is, Giangrande says. “Most companies who are more progressive in the DE&I area, or further along in the journey, tend to have female CEOs or women on their boards.”
A brand’s overall outcomes also may tell you something. “There’s a lot of research that shows that organizations that are committed to DE&I tend to have better outcomes from a revenue perspective, from a growth perspective, from a market-share perspective,” Giangrande says.
Forthcoming research by the RIDC provides more insight into how running industry companies are tracking and measuring DEI efforts, separate from revenue. Here’s a preview:
Although data on brands’ DEI efforts may not be easily accessible, many brands at least seem to value DEI more than they once did. As consumers use the information they have available to make purchasing decisions, they have more influence than they think they do.
Final Thoughts
When news broke last month about the overpolicing incident at mile 21 of the Boston Marathon, the first brand we noticed publicly addressing the issue was Brooks, via the company’s Instagram account. Not only did Brooks immediately post in support of their ambassadors and other BIPOC crews they have no affiliation with, but this action and its timing also revealed that the brand didn’t allow corporate rules to get in the way of taking action at a moment when BIPOC groups were being traumatized and harmed. Commenters on this post praised Brooks and raved about being (or becoming) a loyal customer.
“We’re moving in the direction where the consumer . . . is being much more empowered and leveraging that empowerment to hold companies, brands, organizations accountable,” Giangrande says. “I think as consumers start to do more diligence in terms of determining whether a company is truly committed or not, and supporting those that are and encouraging the ones that are not, that will make a huge difference.”
Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor based in metro Detroit. She writes about running, other sports, the outdoors, health and wellness, and other topics, often focusing on issues of equity and access for underrepresented people. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Outside, Well+Good, espnW, Runner's World, Women's Running, and other national and local Detroit-area publications. She is co-lead of the RIDC's Media Subgroup.
