Diversity in business is almost as big a topic as diversity in education of late.

Last week, Facebook released its diversity numbers, and earlier this week, a Google employee found himself in hot water over a memo he wrote regarding Alphabet's diversity initiatives.

With all of this in the air, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon appeared on CNBC this week, diversity of course came up.

While on the network, Dimon said that JPMorgan has “done as well as almost any corporation out there” when it comes to having black representation in its workforce.

In crunching the bank's numbers, Bloomberg found that 13.7 percent of the financial firm's U.S. workforce is black.

While that is a better percentage than Facebook (which stands at three percent) and Google (currently at two percent), that number represents a decrease in the bank's black workforce.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, JPMorgan Chase was 15.9 percent black in 2012.

And JPMorgan isn't alone in this decrease. The EEOC found that this downward trend could be seen in many other Wall Street institutions. Big banks that didn't see losses saw incremental gains: over a span of four years, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both became only 0.3 percent blacker.

Photo: Bloomberg Business

Like his colleagues at Facebook, Dimon said that increasing his company's percentage of black workers isn't easy, but that it is something the company is committed to continue to work on.

“We’re making a special effort because we acknowledge that while we’ve done as well as almost any corporation out there, we haven’t done JPMorgan well," said Dimon. "JPMorgan well" refers to the company's pride at always having an edge on the competition.

And just what is causing this reversal of gains and this stagnation?

It's a lot of things, according to Dimon. But one issue lies with systemic racism and the difficulty America has had with overcoming the past.

“We have to acknowledge the reason it's different is it's a different history, a different background. A lot of African Americans didn’t grow up in the same neighborhoods as white people,” he said. “Whites are maybe less comfortable with them.”

In a separate Bloomberg report, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, Sergio Sotolongo suggested that Dimon is onto something with his assessment of his industry. "No one was wearing a white hood and sheets," Sotolongo said, "But the whole idea was that the finance industry had in it a culture that was not friendly or receptive to change."

There is some hope, however.

Between 2012 and 2016, the percentages of Asian and Latinx employees increased at many big banks, suggesting that there is room for minorities in finance. At Citigroup, for example, the number of Asian workers in managerial positions increased 7.7 percent over the four year period.

When black employees will begin to see those sorts of gains remains to be seen.

"We've got to do better with African Americans," Dimon said, "And we're going to."

Jamie Dimon

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