Pam Kaur, HSBC’s India-born chief risk officer, has responsibility for overseeing the lender’s worldwide ethnicity inclusion program and is also the global sponsor for its Embrace network, which is aimed at helping the company attract and retain a more diverse workforce.
Past efforts fell short, HSBC Chief Executive Officer Noel Quinn said in May at a diversity event organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
“I’m going to open up to the fact that we haven’t done well enough on that, and the events of a year ago with George Floyd, were a wakeup call I think for us all,” Quinn said. “It was a wakeup call for me because I sat down with our Black colleagues after that, and a number of us did as leaders, and said ‘OK, we’ve got to do something differently.’”
‘Rather Just Leave’
In his report, Clarke identifies himself as half Black, half White and LGBTQ. In a biography in a trade publication last year, he noted his dad is Jamaican but that he was raised by his English mother in a London housing project. In high school, Clarke said he got bullied for being “too Black, too White, too posh (the accent) and probably gay.” After college, he recalled, “the accounting firms wouldn’t even interview me, but HSBC recognized the value my uniqueness could bring and helped me flourish.”
Yet the series of talks with colleagues shifted his perspective, according to the report. “My findings troubled me greatly, and changed the way I viewed myself and my employer,” he wrote.
Clarke largely focused on colleagues who are BIPOC—Black, indigenous and other people of color—an acronym that’s gained popularity during the past year’s debate over racial injustice.
Two BIPOC women Clarke interviewed lauded HSBC’s culture as inclusive but described feeling undervalued once the pandemic struck last year. One with severe asthma said her manager rejected her request to work remotely, leaving her “hurt and confused” because it seemed the boss would “rather I catch the virus and died.”
In another passage, Clarke said he and others witnessed senior White colleagues at a Christmas party “committing physical and verbal sexual assaults” on younger women. The firm encourages staff to report such incidents.
“I would rather just leave and go to another bank who would support my aspirations,” Clarke quoted one employee as saying. “Many other people feel this way.”
Tracking Defections
Overall, the report makes the case that HSBC has “abnormal levels of systemic discrimination” and that BIPOC departures are now so frequent that it threatens to doom the bank’s efforts to diversify with recruitment.
To make his point, he tracked down five BIPOC employees who left one department and discovered they all landed higher positions at rivals including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.
“Yet nobody is saying anything or has done anything to demonstrate to those of us left that their concerns were noted and will be addressed,” he wrote in the report.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.