At Levi’s, DEI Progress Comes Amid Missteps

Tara Donaldson
·7 min read

Things appear to be ticking along with diversity at Levi Strauss & Co. as the company looks to further consideration and representation on all fronts.

On the pro side, Levi’s has hired its first Black executive team member: Kenneth Mitchell, formerly of Snap Inc., will take up the mantle as Levi’s chief marketing officer on June 5. Levi’s previously hadn’t had any Black team members on its executive leadership team, at least since it started sharing data in 2020. The timing of Mitchell’s hiring means he’s not reflected in representation for the current 2022 DE&I Impact Report, released Tuesday.

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When it comes to gender representation, Michelle Gass was a big get when she joined as president of Levi’s, on a track to assume the chief executive officer role in about a year. And the new CEO of the company’s Dockers business, Natalie MacLennan, is also a woman. Beyond those two hires, female representation on the executive team slid from 61.5 percent last year to 54.6 percent.

“That’s still something we’re very focused on, both roles at the top and the identities and inclusive makeup of that [executive] team,” Elizabeth A. Morrison, the company’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, told WWD. “As we’re continuing to transform the business and leaders and alignment, we’re constantly looking for opportunities to obviously elevate talent onto that team but then also, when we have opportunities for hire, we’re really going to market looking for the best talent and also ensuring we have diverse leads.”

Top management at Levi’s currently looks like this: 45.2 percent women (compared to 42.6 percent the previous year), 18.6 percent Asian (15.7 percent in 2021), 5.7 percent Black (4.7 percent in 2021), 9 percent Latine (down from 9.4 percent the previous year) and 61.9 percent white (64.9 percent in 2021).

In all cases, diversity across Levi’s corporate, while up, has increased less than 1 percentage point for each ethnic group.

As far as efforts for 2023, plans include continuing to examine pay equity (which is presently at parity, the company said) with a deep-dive study returning in 2024, tapping into the company’s “frontline population,” as Morrison referred to them, to hear and work to rectify their challenges, and launching new aspects to its inclusive recruiting process.

“We’ve made some progress but we see more room for growth in hiring diverse talent,” Morrison said. One effort underway includes creating a score card to track the candidate conversion process to ideally highlight “where we have room for improvement from the sourcing through to hiring and onboarding of diverse talent,” she added.

The report comes after Levi’s found itself called out for what consumers felt could be exactly the opposite of hiring diverse talent: finding ways around hiring them by using AI instead.

In March, the company announced a partnership with digital fashion studio Lalaland.ai and said it would use “AI-generated models to supplement human models, increasing the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way.”

When tech publication PetaPixel posted the news on its Twitter, reactions poured in.

One user, @mudpiix, wrote: “Because paying real people for their diversity is too much.”

Another, @minaisen, tweeted: “There should be legislation to require every company using AI-generated models/actors in ads to post a disclaimer saying ‘We are using AI-generated models because we are too cheap to hire people’ the same way pharma ads have to disclose to their side-effects.”

“We do not see our limited Lalaland.ai pilot as a means to advance diversity or as a substitute for the real action that must be taken to deliver on our diversity, equity and inclusion goals and our communications should have made that clear,” Morrison told WWD. “That said, we are digitally transforming our business, integrating new tools and technologies to increase speed, efficiency, agility, and improve our consumer’s experience. The announcement was an opportunity for us to showcase how we’re treating emerging technology and innovation, testing generative AI to enhance the consumer experience, and also be transparent and proactive about the use of this technology before it went live on our site.

“However, our initial communication around this particular partnership did not properly represent certain aspects of the program,” she continued. “This, understandably, struck a chord with many of our consumers and employees, which we are responding to by listening, learning and, with the ongoing support of our leadership and our entire company, continuing to move forward in intentional and strategic ways, including pausing the pilot to draft and implement AI principles and ways of working to ensure future alignment.”

The work continues at Levi’s to get its internal culture and communication right and to stamp out the kind of slights that come with bias, unconscious or otherwise.

This year, the company’s annual global learning initiative, dubbed The Pledge, is focused on psychological safety (last year it was microagressions) with the aim of getting staff to feel comfortable as their whole, authentic selves at work — they’ve brought in race and trauma specialist and psychologist Dr. Jamila Codrington to aid. And there’s a Next-Gen Leadership training designed to equip managers with the tools to understand and best accommodate the way next-gen talent wants to feel at work and how they want to use their voices in the organization. Levi’s is also paying attention to bias that could see undue load placed on certain groups and not others.

Really, according to Morrison, it’s a lot about middle manager effectiveness.

“In DE&I we call it the frozen middle because those managers are honestly the ones who have the heaviest remit, they’re leading the majority of the workforce, they also have pretty robust jobs themselves and when we are under stress we default to old thinking and old habits and that could be biased without you even really being aware of that,” she said. “So slowing down people’s decision-making process, making them aware of these experiences, of our talent here and at other organizations, and giving them the tools and the skills and the language they need to address it and acknowledge it is critical.”

One thing Morrison doesn’t feel is critical? Diversity councils, which many organizations may have embraced since 2020.

“I am not a fan because I have in the past experienced them not being effective,” she said. “Getting people to act is a little bit of art and a little bit of science. The science of it is showing them the statistics and really kind of the hard facts around equity and I think that’s become a little bit easier, there’s been much more research and studies and things published even just since 2020… So we’re having less of ‘this is the right thing to do’ and more of ‘this is a critical business driver.’ Our consumers are changing, the folks that we hire are changing and if we don’t change, we’re not going to be able to be effective with either one of those.”

A key step, Morrison said, is getting people to discover their own “personal passion around DE&I.”

“Everybody has had an experience where they’ve been excluded — I don’t care who you are, you could be Chip Bergh [CEO of Levi’s], you’ve had a time where you’ve sat in a room and you did not feel like you were being included in the conversation,” she said. “And if you can ground people and help people to recall that, a time where they felt excluded and then say, ‘OK now what if that was your life, what if you lived that every day?’” then you can start to get somewhere.

And that’s where a clear plan around action comes in.

“They have to understand and empathize but then they have to see a pathway. And it can’t be too complicated or convoluted. Like, if I do these three things it will improve my inclusive leadership and I can create psychological safety on my team and a culture of belonging. I can sell you on doing three things,” Morrison said. “Especially if you understand context and what a big difference that’s going to make, and then ultimately, you understand what’s in it for you, a more high performing team, folks that are going to use their voice more, go above and beyond for the work.”

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