Quota Law made it easier to hire black people, says Ambev executive

Hiring black people has not been a challenge for Ambev. According to executive Carla Crippa, vice president of relations with society, the Quota Law facilitated this process.

“When we went after the candidates, they were there,” he said during the Brasil Diverse Forum, an event held this Tuesday (8) in São Paulo and which debated issues related to diversity and inclusion in organizations.

The biggest challenge, says Crippa, is training leaders who relate to black employees.

“Most of the time it is a white leader, who is not prepared to deal with that diversity. He goes to lunch with a scholarship candidate and talks about international travel,” he said. “Many times trainees complain that they have no way to talk, have no topic, cannot network,” he added.

The executive said that the turning point for Ambev came after the recognition that what was being done was not enough.

According to her, it didn’t make sense for a company with more than 50% of black people on the staff to have the vast majority of leadership positions filled by whites.

The creator of the forum, the former secretary of Promotion of Racial Equality of São Paulo Maurício Pestana said that companies can no longer escape the racial agenda and that some great leaders have already understood that not implementing policies to address inequality means losing market and investments.

The question now is to face not only unconscious biases, but conscious ones as well.

“We are better than we were five, eight years ago, and this greater number of black men and women who are arriving [no mercado] is causing some strangeness”, he said. “Many people will start to want to stop this advance, which is an advance of someone who has waited more than a hundred years to be included.”

In its eighth edition, e vento brought together specialists and business leaders. Among the topics discussed, the importance of affirmative action stood out in a year that celebrates the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Quota Law.

Hire, train and promote representation. These are some of the strategies that a company can adopt to improve the diversity of its workforce, says Kwami Alfama, CEO of French company Tereos Amido & Adoçantes in Brazil and one of the rare black people in charge of a multinational company.

The executive participated in one of the forum’s panels and opened his speech by commenting on how he feels being an exception in the market. “It’s something that really bothers me when we talk about the ‘only black CEO’ or ‘half a dozen’. It’s extremely impactful to hear that.”

In Alfama’s view, the absence of black people in leadership positions is the result of three factors, above all. The first of these is the lack of opportunity. “Our historical and social construction perpetuates the idea that the white, straight and without disabilities are professionals who are better prepared for spaces of power”, he comments.

This dynamic, he says, is often repeated in companies, whether in hiring, promotions or performance evaluations. “That’s why I think affirmative actions are so important, because they cause a fissure in this behavior.”

The second factor mentioned by Alfama is the lack of representation. The executive, who is from Cape Verde, commented on how the presence of black people in political positions and at the top of large companies — something normal in his country, he says — has a positive impact on people’s perspectives and careers. “Unfortunately that doesn’t happen in Brazil. I’ve been here for 26 years and I say with confidence that this is a problem.”

The third factor is the challenges of training black people, not only at the beginning of their careers, but even for those who already occupy leadership positions.