The Black Equity Index promotes greater accountability and harnesses the collective power and knowledge of the professional world to empower Black talent and to create opportunity for the community. The Black Equity Index improves hiring, representation, promotion, inclusion, and retention of Black professionals across the corporate sector.

The Black Equity Index reinforces commitments to racial equity and allows companies to drive sustainable, measurable change, by providing an independent benchmark to improve across shared principles and track true progress year after year.

The Black Equity Index will collect company information on representation, as well as programs, policies, processes, and practices that impact Black employees and the community.

Companies will receive their scores privately, with ways to improve and excel over time. Coqual will publish aggregated data, trends, and insights, and offer a series of actionable recommendations to advance companies’ commitments to Black equity.

The 2023 BEI survey opened in February 2023 in celebration of Black History Month and closed on April 28th, 2023. Participants can expect to receive their confidential individual scores in November 2023.

No, companies do not need to be a research sponsor or a Task Force member to participate in the Black Equity Index.

There is not a limit to the number of participating companies.

The Black Equity Index is fully independent, with criteria set by Coqual—–a third party attuned to the standards that help employers make measurable progress on racial equity. The depth and scope of the index and the information Coqual gathers and analyzes as a nonprofit think tank is more expansive than what companies are doing internally.

Rather than merely measure current state, the index is aspirational, and is grounded in Coqual research. It helps companies understand where they are against current goals and where they should aspire to go next. Because the BEI aims to improve hiring, representation, promotion, inclusion, and retention of Black professionals, the index not only looks at data on representation but also on programs, policies, processes, and practices that impact Black employees and the community.

No, there is no cost to participate in the Black Equity Index.

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