[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Goldman Sachs and MetLife will publicly disclose information regarding the racial and gender breakdowns of their staffs, at the request of New York City’s public pension funds, whose assets exceed $118 billion.  This could lead to changes that would benefit company shareholders, as well as their current and future employees, said the city’s comptroller, John C. Liu, who will announce the agreement on Monday.

The State of New York. Although New York City has the highest concentration of high-paying jobs in finance and advertising of any city in the country and maybe in the world, those industries have been slower than others to move minorities and women into their management ranks, according to studies. To date, with an eye to Wall Street, the pension funds cited federal data that showed that white men held 64% of the management-level jobs in the financial-services industry, while minorities held less than 10% of them – a gap that has not changed significantly during the 15-year period from 1993 to 2008, the United States Government Accountability Office found. Exception to the Rule. Currently, big employers are required to report data to the federal government on their efforts to provide equal employment opportunities.  Yet, those numbers have not been made available to the public.  Unlike Goldman and MetLife, not all of the biggest banks and advertising agencies have given into requests by managers of the city's pension funds who have been using their financial clout to demand disclosure from the biggest banks and advertising agencies they invest in. Leverage. By disclosing their statistics annually beginning later this year, Goldman and MetLife have avoided proposals by pension-fund managers that resolutions on disclosure be put up for a vote at a company’s annual meeting.  Case in Point: Omnicon Group, which did not agree to the pension funds' demands, will face a vote when shareholders meet in San Francisco later this month on May 22. The pension funds – which include the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, the Teachers’ Retirement System, the New York City Police Pension Fund, the New York City Fire Department Pension Fund and the Board of Education Retirement System – own over 1.2 million shares of stock in Goldman Sachs, over 2.3 million shares of MetLife, and about 709,000 shares of Omnicom. "Studies have shown the benefits of a diverse work force on company performance and long-term shareowner value, and many companies say they are making serious efforts to recruit, retain and promote women and minorities.  But without quantitative disclosure, shareholders have no way to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts." -- Mr. Liu, who is a trustee of the pension funds. For further details, go to [NYTimes, 4/15/12].