MANAGING DIVERSITY: Grappling With Change in the Work Force. A SPECIAL REPORT : UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITY : Minorities Find That Roadblocks to the Executive Suite Are Still in Place

Leroy Nunery is the picture of success, a corporate banker comfortably ensconced in the middle class, with a graduate degree, a comfortable home in the suburbs and a sense of savvy about the business world.

One thing, though, makes Nunery, who works for the Swiss Bank in New York’s World Trade Center, and his wife, Carolyn, an officer at another bank, suspect their advancement in business ultimately will be blocked. The Nunerys are black.

“Our concerns about whether or not the structures we work in or have worked in are fair and give a true accounting for what we bring to the party are still there,” said the 32-year-old Nunery, president of the National Black MBA Assn. “Our bottom-line feel is there is something wrong.”

In the corporate chase, most people harbor doubts about whether their work is fully appreciated or their goals reachable. But there can be no question, more than two decades after civil rights laws banned job discrimination, that the uncertainties are most justified for minorities and women. The simple fact, minority leaders and management experts say, is that corporations have not dismantled the obstacles that bar virtually anyone who is not a white male from the upper reaches of American business.

There has been progress. Since 1970, the number of women, blacks and Latinos in management have quadrupled, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the number of Asians has increased by nearly eightfold.

‘Glass Ceilings’

Yet the rate of advancement has slowed for women and minorities in the 1980s. And the management jobs they have obtained often carry less clout than those filled by white men--who still control 97% of all senior management posts.

Studies have found that women managers often get less prestigious assignments and supervise fewer workers than do men. Few minority managers, meanwhile, have advanced in the line jobs--sales, finance and operations, for instance--that are the building blocks for careers in senior management, with many instead getting assignments in human resources, community relations and public affairs.

To many women and minorities in business, the “glass ceilings” into which they are slamming provide clear evidence of nothing less than the abiding racism and sexism of the corporation.

“In the past, it was that you didn’t have the experience, or if you had the experience, you didn’t have the degrees,” said Fred S. Rodriguez, a mid-level manager for a Los Angeles aerospace firm and founder of the Personnel Management Assn. of Aztlan, a group for Latino human resources professionals.

“Now, there are people who have the experience and have the degrees, and they still don’t move up,” Rodriguez said. “So it must be something else.”

In a series of studies conducted over the last 16 years, sociologist John P. Fernandez has questioned 17,000 employees in two dozen of the largest American corporations about racial and sexual prejudice at work. His latest findings indicate that perceptions of race and sex bias actually increased from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, as competition for a shrinking number of management positions grew ugly and government attentiveness to job discrimination waned.

Excluded From Work Groups

Fernandez’s 1984-86 survey of 12,000 workers found that two-thirds saw evidence of sex discrimination at their jobs and 60% saw signs of racism; perceptions of both racism and sexism grew more intense as women and minorities advanced in management.

Eight out of 10 blacks, three out of four women and half of all other minorities told Fernandez that nonwhites and women were excluded from informal networks and work groups at their company. The majority of men said they thought women got their jobs on the basis of their sex, not their qualifications, and a majority of whites said they thought minorities got their jobs on the basis of their race, not their skills.

In such an environment, many minorities learn to regard the office as foreign turf. The unspoken demand, often, is that minorities and women overhaul their personalities to make it in a white, male world.

R. Roosevelt Thomas, executive director of the American Institute for Managing Diversity at Morehouse College in Atlanta, tells of a discussion with one nonwhite about his job at a large company. “He said, ‘Roosevelt, I feel like I lost an arm,’ ” Thomas recounted. “ ‘I was a square peg in a round hole. To make it here, I really had to chop on myself.’ ”

Aspiring workers who don’t fit the corporate mold may not even get a chance to fit in. “The hardest part for Asians is looking good in the interview, because they tend to be quiet and reserved,” said Catherine Ong, a former president of the Asian-American CPAs of San Francisco. “Yet for public accounting, they want to hire the real loud, personable person who can go out and deal with clients and be assertive.”

So who do white managers select for jobs at Big Eight accounting firms? “They hire the Asians that do fit the mold of people like themselves,” said Ong, a tax consultant for Price Waterhouse.

Immigrants--who will constitute more than one in five of the new workers nationwide through 2000, according to U.S. Labor Department estimates--face a special set of problems.

Judy Riggs works with a largely immigrant labor force as training director at Esprit de Corp., a San Francisco clothing manufacturer, and teaches communications courses for foreign-born professionals at UC Berkeley. When she recently surveyed both groups to gauge their biggest difficulties at work, four issues topped the list: communication, lack of understanding of foreign ways by Americans, confusion about their employers’ expectations and discrimination.

‘Work Twice as Hard’

An accent, alone, can label an immigrant as too different to merit advancement, insists one of Riggs’ students, a European-born systems analyst at the Bank of America who feared reprisal if he were named.

“Because of that, most of the time we’re not taken seriously by the decision-making process,” said the analyst, eating pizza at an Italian restaurant, decorated last month for St. Patrick’s Day, in an Asian section of San Francisco. “Americans, when they try to make an effort to understand us, they feel they’re making a special effort for that purpose, and therefore they don’t pay as much attention to what we say.”

A Taiwanese-born architect at the table expressed a frustration shared by many minorities, both natives and immigrants, who aspire to advance in business or the professions.

“It reminds me of what that actress, Bette Davis, said,” the architect complained. “She said a woman, being a minority, has to work twice as hard, getting only half as far. And I think we’re doing the same thing.”

Within companies, minority group members in middle and upper management are only beginning to find the confidence to tell white executives the unvarnished truth about the institutional biases that stymie the full integration of corporate America. Many top executives, in fact, may still have the impression that past efforts were enough to give women and minorities a fair shake.

“Until a few years ago, no one who was black could get ahead unless he said, ‘Everything is great here! It’s a wonderful company!’ ” said Edward W. Jones Jr., a former Bell System executive who has written articles for the Harvard Business Review credited with helping shatter corporate complacency about the status of black managers. “Even the most well-intended white executive can’t help you solve problems that he doesn’t understand and you don’t tell him about.”

Still, women and minorities in corporations walk a tightrope in focusing top management’s attention on issues of race and sex. Many want to be judged solely on the basis of individual achievement. Most could have done without the bruising white-male backlash to affirmative action. Yet few want companies to ignore the obstacles they have had to overcome, either.

Support Counterbalances

“I do not want to be viewed as different--and I do,” said Nunery, the banker. “I want everyone to understand that my needs are going to be different based on where I come from, but I don’t want my skills to be viewed, or my contributions to be viewed, any differently.”

To get their due, says A. Barry Rand, a black man who is president of Xerox’s U.S. sales and service organization, women and minorities must continue to support corporate programs that act as a counterbalance to American society’s deeply rooted prejudices.

“As long as we have cultural biases, as long as we have racial biases that inhibit people from having equal opportunity, then minorities and females want those behaviors counteracted so we can have an equal footing and an equal chance,” he said. “So, if programs are set up that, if implemented well, level the playing field, then yes, people still want to have a level playing field.”

The corporate sector’s new focus on America’s cultural diversity seems promising to many concerned with the advancement of women and minorities.

“It’s working on removing the blocks that may exist that you need to remove before you can evaluate individuals on an individual basis,” said Lisa Hicks, an assistant director at Catalyst, a New York-based advisory and research group for women in business.

Businesses, though, have their toughest time evaluating performance at the higher tiers to which women and minorities now are demanding access. Beneath a facade of objectivity lurks an unscientific hodgepodge of subjective criteria--including top executives’ comfort in working alongside candidates for promotion--that can prove especially daunting to aspirants from outside the white-male caste that historically has led corporations.

“One of the issues with women and minorities,” Rand said, “is that they are not in a position to understand what the subjective criteria are or to influence them.”

Rather than change the standards, some consultants on cultural diversity contend, companies need to give minorities training to cast off the ethnic anchors that hold back their advancement and to learn the mores of the white-male-dominated workplace.

“Women and minorities themselves are not doing the things they could to maximize their development,” said Mark Wallace, a Boston consultant who has worked with such companies as Digital Equipment and Dow Corning.

“We do a lot of training to help ‘non-traditionals’ understand the need for higher commitment . . . ,” he said. “We talk about some real heavy, heavy stuff for the purpose of helping people get their heads together, assimilate and be better producers.”

But with the power of demographic change at their heels, minority managers may, for the first time, be in a position to wait and watch as business’s power structure does some assimilating of its own.

“The white male will have to become bicultural,” said Daisy Chin-Lor, an Avon Products executive who designed the cosmetics company’s cultural diversity programs. “He will have to manage within his own culture and learn more about others.”

“As a minority,” said Chin-Lor, a Chinese-American, “I have been bicultural all my life.”