8 FORTUNE DECEMBER 2020 /JANUARY 2021
EVERY YEAR in Fortune’s annual
Investor’s Guide, we make a point of
letting readers know how our previous year’s
picks performed. Such disclosures have
made us look good of late—the more than
two dozen stocks and ETFs our investment
team recommended in last December’s
guide earned a median return of 20.6%
A Challenge
to Measure Up
since we published the list, edging past
the S&P 500 over the same time period.
Meanwhile, last year’s Future 50 port-
folio, which we put together with our
partner BCG, has trounced that bench-
mark, returning nearly 71%. (To see our
investment picks for 2021 as well as the
latest edition of the Future 50, please
see our stories beginning on page 46 and
page 113.)
But accountability should go beyond
what we say, it must also apply to what
we do. And so I want to take a moment
to review an analysis that some of my
colleagues and I did for Fortune this year.
We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion
in these pages, on our website, and on our
conference stage—and I wanted to see
how well our story assignments reflected
that focus. The results were surprising,
disappointing, and, frankly, embarrass-
ing: Of the nearly 400 byline-attributable
stories that we ran in the print magazine
in 2020 (through this issue), 61% were
written by men and 39% by women. In
the case of longer feature assignments,
we were even more unbalanced—assign-
ing 63% to male writers and just 37% to
women. A mere 13% of our stories were
assigned to people of color.
Fifty-four of the 60 illustrators we
hired were men—and only four were
nonwhite. In the case of photography,
our ranks were more even (a ratio of 23men to 16 women), but still not balanced.
Eight of our photographers identify as
people of color.
Diversity ought to be reflected in the
people we cover and quote. But in my own
magazine stories this year, which include
these monthly editor’s notes, my record
was even worse: Fewer than one-third
(32%) of the people I cited or mentioned
were women, and a shockingly small num-
ber were nonwhite.
These are failures of complacency. It’s
all too easy to preach about the impor-
tance of diversity, but as this accounting
shows, it’s almost effortless to do noth-
ing about it. Our eyes are designed to
notice movement. And unfortunately, our
everyday practices at work—who we as-
sign, how we hire and promote, who gets
mentored—often lurk in the realm of the
invisible.
It is for that critically important reason
that we have launched a partnership with
the financial data firm Refinitiv, which has
added a new component to its pioneer-
ing environmental, social, and corporate
governance data—a tool to collect and
report diversity and inclusion metrics. Our
collaboration will help companies hold
themselves accountable for their diversity
efforts—something I wish I had done long
ago as editor of Fortune. You can’t count
on progress, after all, if you don’t count
what goes into making it. I am committed
to having next year’s byline disclosure look
a lot more like the nation of storytellers
around us.CLIFTON LEAF
Editor-in-Chief, Fortune
@CliftonLeafFOREWORDILLUSTRATION BY SAM KERR