Goldman's Anti-Bro Pledge Isn't Just a Stunt
The Wall Street giant no doubt wants to put IPO embarrassments behind it. But its refusal to accept straight white men-only boards is a good start.
Dancing with diversity.
Photographer: Bloomberg
It’s easy to be cynical about the good intentions of a company caught up in one of the biggest frauds in history: the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia. Yet Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s new stance on boardroom diversity shows how even the most profit-oriented of finance titans can — when pushed — further the virtues of stakeholder capitalism.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global leaders vowed to save humanity from climate change, Goldman’s chief executive officer, David Solomon, set forth a vision for his bank’s role in imposing better governance on its clients. From July it won’t manage the initial public offerings of American and European companies unless they have at least one non-white or non-straight male board candidate, Solomon said (the focus will be on women). In 2021, he’s going to “move toward… requesting two.”