Precious Dube and Bongiwe Mbambo. Africa’s first black, female marine pilots to obtain an open licence that enables them to navigate ships of any size and type into South African waters. Photo via OBMG
by John Konrad (gCaptain) Just under a month since the start of the Board Diversity Action Alliance, big-time businesses including Albertsons, Centene Corp., Nordstrom Inc., and Under Armour have joined the BDAA to help increase Black representation on corporate boards across America. The firms are joining with corporate giants Dow, Macy’s, Mastercard, PNC, Uber, and UPS as founding signatories of BDAA. But where are the shipping and offshore energy companies?
The firms are pledging to boost the number of diverse representatives on their boards to one or more, making their board demographics known by a number, and disclosing the race and ethnicity of board directors.
“Our objective is to achieve greater diversity overall – brown, Latinx, women – all of these perspectives are important.” Ursula Burns, founder of Board Diversity Action Alliance told Black Enterprise. “The BDAA is a voluntary and business-led initiative, but overall we are aligned with the recent mandate in State of California with respect to outcomes.”
So far over a dozen large companies have joined the alliance but not a single company in the maritime or offshore industry.
Companies interested in improving diversity on their boards can contact BDAA or one of the few – but highly effective – maritime organizations committed to diversity. Organizations like Wista, Woman Offshore, or the Organization of Black Maritime Graduates.
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