What Should You Be Paid to Champion Diversity? A New Salary Survey Revealed.

At most U.S. corporations, a promotion to an executive-level position is an excellent career move providing qualified candidates greater access to an organization’s strategic-planning processes.  Executive titles also frequently entail a move into a larger office, control over a real budget and possibly an assistant.  But what about compensation?

It’s an issue that can be thorny, especially as corporate America looks carefully at the bottom-line impact of each employee hire during these perilous economic times.  While there are plenty of benchmarks for compensation packages for a wide variety of executive titles, those working in diversity have found little information to gauge the worth of their jobs.

As the diversity director becomes commonplace, the question of proper compensation for such a position is raised frequently by both the company and the candidate during negotiations with neither knowing where to look for a benchmark.

Maureen Sanderson, diversity director for Chicago-based Ravenswood Physician Associates (RPA), found herself in such a predicament in February.

RPA is comprised of 250 physicians, 100 of whom are primary-care doctors and the remaining 150 are specialists.  The company’s doctors also represent 40 different countries and speak several different languages.  Realizing the advantage that its own diversity presented, RPA decided to market the diversity of its physician staff and its ability to provide culturally competent medical service to Chicago’s diverse populace.

Sanderson, who has a background in Southeast Asian affairs and has experience in multicultural markets, had previously worked on opening a factory in India.  She was promoted from a medical-referrals position to RPA’s diversity director.  But when the salary negotiation was to start neither Sanderson nor RPA could think of a reasonable figure with which to begin.

“I was desperately searching on career and government sites for diversity director positions in different cities,” said Sanderson.  “But I’d have to look at things that were human resources-related and I wasn’t going to be dealing with that and then I’d find trainer positions under human resources, but that’s not exactly what I was doing either.”

Because of the dearth of prominently visible diversity directors, the marketplace lacks a salary benchmark for the position.  This is especially problematic for those who work at smaller companies, like Sanderson, who may find themselves in a similar salary negotiation predicament.

But the questions about the appropriate compensation for those working in the burgeoning field of diversity director may soon have some answers.  Mercer Human Resource Consulting, a New York-based consultancy, has conducted salary survey to shed some light on the thorny issue of pay for “EEO/Diversity Manager” and “EEO/Diversity Specialist.”  The annual survey is released in the third quarter of the year.

Over the past two years, the average base salary – with bonuses included – for the two positions have remained relatively stable.  In its new survey, Mercer found that the average annual salary for an EEO/Diversity Manager was $89,600 nationwide, while the average annual salary for an EEO/Diversity Specialist was $60,500.

In conducting its survey, Mercer contacted nearly 1,100 U.S. employers that collectively had more than 10.3 million employees.  The survey also covered 109 human-resource jobs from top management to clerical positions that collectively equaled 46,000 human-resource professionals.  Mercer also segmented the nation and average salaries for each geographical section of the United States.

While fairly accurate, the survey’s questions and job description lumped EEOC officers with diversity managers – jobs with responsibilities that can vary widely between companies – and therefore can’t be considered the last word on the average salary for a diversity director.

Mercer researchers identified each responding company’s highest-ranking executive charged with EEO/diversity concerns.  The survey’s accompanying job description included, “Develops, recommends and implements diversity, equal employment and affirmative action programs … which ensure compliance with the current legal requirements.  Maintains statistics necessary to monitor the effectiveness of the program and alerts top management to difficulty in attaining and maintaining compliance with established policies … Frequently reports to top employee-relations executive or a top corporate human resources executive.”

There isn’t yet a consensus on the appropriate compensation package for diversity directors, so companies often benchmark the diversity director’s salary in comparison the EEOC officer, according to Carl Braun, President of DiversityInc Careers. Braun said he fields at least two calls a month from diversity directors of diversity managers seeking information on the average salary for their position.

Braun noted that diversity professionals at the director level should command a higher salary than an EEO/affirmative action officer because, like Sanderson, they’re focused on company strategy, while the EEO position usually focuses simply on compliance.

“In addition, while the real value is in their knowledge, most diversity directors are people of color or women so the diversity they bring to the senior levels is also an asset to the company,” said Braun.

Another position that the diversity director’s salary is compared to is the human-resources director.  According to Managing Director at Compensation Resources Inc., an Upper Saddle River, N.J.-based firm with a proprietary database of more than 4,000 surveys, the base salary for a human-resources director at a corporation with annual revenues that exceed $500 million is $142,200.

Paul Dorf, managing director of Compensation Resources, said in today’s marketplace, a diversity director is a position that’s most common at large, international corporations, such as Philip Morris, General Electric and Ford Motor Company.  He reasoned that the prevalence of diversity directors at consumer goods companies comes out of the fact that these companies seek to boost revenue through an in-house understanding of emerging markets of color, by building relationships with small businesses owned by people of color and women, as well as seek job candidates of color, women and those with disabilities.  A diversity director helps to centralize intelligence about these key strategic issues.

“Because it’s a position that is just starting to grow and come into its own, there is not a lot of empirical data to say how much those jobs are worth,” said Dorf.   “But it is definitely a phenomenon that will continue to develop.”

Figuring out the position’s worth is not the only concern in the marketplace.  Currently, the diversity-director position is tough to manage because companies are still learning how to measure the benefits of making inroads into markets of color and among recruits of color, Dorf added.

Meanwhile the pioneers of the movement, such as Sanderson, are negotiating salary figures with their employers without any specific guide.

Sanderson gained some information by using the Internet to search Salary.com and found information from the Illinois Department of Labor, her value as a diversity director was determined by RPA negotiators who asked the company’s accounting firm, American Express.

The two sides haggled and settled on a mid-range salary that is far less than Mercer’s average salary for an EEO/Diversity Manager – the title for which Sanderson would qualify.  Sanderson admitted that the experience was frustrating and before saying she felt underpaid, she mentions that the company is small, the atmosphere friendly and the management supportive.  In addition, her review is near and the issue of her compensation will be back on the table.

“From my own experience I see how the information [on salary] just isn’t out there,” said Sanderson.  “It would be very helpful to have more information.”