Rep. Joyce Beatty uses leadership role to push diversity at nation’s banks

Given a chance to grill the CEOs of seven of the largest banks in the country last month, U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty wasted no time.

Did the bank heads have diversity plans in place, and could they send them to her in writing? Who were their asset managers, and did they all look like the uniformly white men on the panel? Would the banks hire directors of diversity so that the CEOs were aware of whether the leadership of the bank included women and minorities?

Then Beatty, the chairwoman of a brand-new House Financial Services Subcommittee devoted to diversity and inclusion, singled out three CEOs — Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup; Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase and Co.; and David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs — thanking them for meeting with her personally to tell them about their work on the issue.

Not long after the hearing, Beatty, who was flying home from D.C., got a call from her office in Columbus. A man was waiting for her in her office. He hadn't made an appointment but insisted he'd wait.

It was Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America — one of the four men whose name Beatty had not singled out for praise.

Beatty said Moynihan told her staffer that he'd wait for her "because I'm committed to spending time with her so she gets to know me and knows about my diversity plan."

Beatty, a Columbus-area Democrat who spent part of her pre-congressional career teaching companies about the benefits of diversity, knows she has a megaphone.

Now, she's determined to use it.

"She is respected," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who noted the subcommittee's placement in the powerful House Financial Services Committee has made it all the more high profile. "Having it central to the Financial Services Committee gives it much more leverage and power."

"There's nobody, no one else, who can do the job better than she can," said House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif.

Beatty is in the middle of a movement, and she knows it.

The "#MeToo" Movement has highlighted sexual assault, but it also spurred a level of scrutiny about whether women and minorities have been given ample opportunities to lead. It's into that fray that Beatty raises her own questions: Do the leaderships of the nation's banks and financial institutions accurately represent the American public?

In the nearly five months since Beatty took the gavel, she's had two hearings — one on diversity trends in the banking industry, and one on the business case for diversity in upper management.

Beatty also has pushed something she calls the "Beatty Rule" — a twist on the NFL's Rooney Rule, which requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. Her rule would apply to financial institutions.

She's provided oversight for Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank Banking Reform Law, which required federal agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Credit Union Administration to create Offices of Minorities and Women Inclusion responsible for matters related to diversity in management, employment and business activities at the companies those agencies oversee.

Her chairwomanship is the culmination of a life's work. In the late 1990s, Beatty owned a management training company that taught about diversity awareness.

Among the agencies she helped was the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, which wrestled with a series of complaints about a lack of diversity. At the bureau, she said, she trained 15 workers at a time in an agency with 3,800 employees.

Sometimes, to illustrate her work, she'd bring in two puzzles. One had all gray pieces. The other had the word "diversity" stripped across the puzzle.

The group would inevitably struggle with the all-gray puzzle but finish the "diversity" puzzle in no time.

Do you know why you're struggling, she would ask those working on the all-gray puzzle?

"They're all screaming the same thing to you," she'd say.

The underlying message: Bringing in different types of people made for different types of viewpoints and perspectives — all useful to make an operation work more smoothly.

Now, she's doing the same work, on a different scale, in Congress. She fell into the work after realizing that the directors of the Offices of Minorities and Women Inclusion who had been hired as a result of Dodd-Frank were largely spinning their wheels, unknown and largely ignored in the agencies she'd been asked to help.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, asked about the office, seemed to know nothing about it. Same with Office of Management and Budget head and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — and the former congressman had sat on the Financial Services Committee with Beatty, listening to her ask witnesses about it.

"I mean, it became embarrassing," she said. "That would not have happened if it were the CPA, the budget person."

She set out to change that, to make sure that the agencies were aware of the director and working with that person. And now she's trying to make banks follow that model, hiring directors of diversity and inclusion who can help the banks work to become more inclusive.

"We're opening the door," she said. "And it has opened wider than I thought."

This article was originally published by the Columbus Dispatch on May 27, 2019.