Scientific American
Why Building a Diverse Company Is Good for Business
Celeste Warren of drug manufacturer Merck discusses diversity in science and medicine and the journey of rising up in the ranks of a major multinational company
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Celeste Warren is vice president of the Global Diversity Center of Excellence at Merck, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies worldwide. She understands what it takes to have an inclusive setting for the workforce. “You want a diverse workforce, so you have to create an inclusive environment around our employees so they’re able to feel energized, they’re able to feel empowered, so they are able to do what we want them to do,” she says.
Black Employees Say Amazon Has a Race Problem
Jason Del Rey, Recode, February 26, 2021
When Chanin Kelly-Rae started working at Amazon in 2019 as a global manager of diversity in the company’s cloud computing division, she had big ambitions for her new job. She had nearly two decades of experience leading diversity and inclusion efforts inside important institutions, like Washington state’s governor’s office, but she’d never worked at an influential global business leader like Amazon.
But less than a year later, Kelly-Rae quit. Her tenure inside the company convinced her that Amazon’s corporate workplace has deep, systemic issues that disadvantage Black employees and workers from other underrepresented backgrounds. And she was dismayed by her perception that Amazon leadership was unwilling to listen to internal experts about how to identify and fix these problems.
Asa Mathat for Vox Media This story is part of a group of stories called Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing and changing us.
In the wake of a Recode investigation detailing allegations that Black workers face an unlevel playing field in Amazon’s corporate offices, the company’s future CEO defended Amazon while also acknowledging, “[W]e have a lot of work to do.”
In an internal email on Monday addressed to leaders of Amazon’s Black employee affinity group that Recode viewed, Andy Jassy, who will replace Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO later this year, said he felt recent articles about racial equity at Amazon were “skewed portraits of the company.”
Black-owned D.C. restaurant distributes meals to first-responders, front-line workers We really wanted to make sure that we could get those meals out to those individuals in need, Booker Parchment, the owner of Mr. Braxton Bar and Kitchen, says
Alicia Diaz
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Mr. Braxton Bar and Kitchen, a Black-owned restaurant in Washington, distributed 700 free meals to residents, front-line workers and emergency first responders last weekend, one of eight Black-owned restaurants in cities across the country that participated in the meal distribution program.
“We really wanted to make sure that we could get those meals out to those individuals in need,”