To see the results of our 2007 Diversity Survey, click here.

Having finished a big presentation to the management of a Mexican resort, Oscar Munoz, the 47-year-old CFO of transportation giant CSX Corp., was passing through the pool area when he was interrupted by a white-American couple on vacation. "Can you take care of these?" the husband asked as he thrust wet, dirty towels into Munoz's hands.

Munoz, a Mexican-American, tells the story with a laugh — he even found an appropriate spot for the towels. As the finance chief for a $9.5 billion global company, he can afford to take a generous view of his mistaken identity. Still, he's not unaware of the implications. "Everyone has images in their mind of what to expect from different groups," he says.

For decades, companies have been trying to modify their own perceptions and expectations of underrepresented groups. Through diversity programs, special recruiting efforts, and affinity groups, they have reached out to women and minorities in hopes of creating more parity in the upper ranks. But while women have made some progress, minorities have made little.

That's particularly true in finance departments. While the number of women CFOs in the Fortune 500 has risen steadily, from 24 in 2001 to 38 this year, for people of color only the names have changed: six years ago CFO magazine counted 14 minority finance chiefs among those companies, the same as in 2006 (see "The Great Divide").

At lower levels within the finance department, the disparity between women and minorities is even more dramatic. CFO estimates that 16 percent of Fortune 500 controllers are women, while only 4 percent are minorities. The numbers are similar for treasurers, with 16 percent women and 6 percent minorities. Sixty percent of respondents to a recent survey of CFO readers estimate that their finance departments have more female employees than the rest of the company; in contrast, about half surveyed say their department lags the company as a whole in terms of African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American staff.

Few finance chiefs have a fix on why more women than minorities have moved up the corporate-finance ladder. "The only thing I can point to is that we have a great pool of women to choose from because we have been hiring talented women for the past 20 years, whereas the push to hire minorities is much newer," says Doreen Toben, CFO of $93 billion Verizon Communications Co. And unfortunately, if the statistics from the CFO survey — which show that more than 60 percent of respondents do not consider diversity efforts a high priority — are any indication, the situation will not change anytime soon.

Power in Degrees
One reason more women than minorities have succeeded in finance is simply a function of demographics. Women make up about 50 percent of the U.S. population, while minorities total about 30 percent (male and female combined). And women are evenly dispersed (and in fact outnumber men) in nearly every state. In contrast, non-white populations are heavily concentrated in certain states, like Texas and California, and all but absent from others, like Maine and Montana, according to 2005 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Socioeconomic factors also play a part. For most female CFOs, the majority of whom are white, going to college was a given. Some, such as Janet Clark of Marathon Oil and Patricia McKay at Office Depot, had fathers who were finance executives and mothers who encouraged ambition in their daughters. Linda Harty, CFO of a $77 billion division of Cardinal Health, recalls that her parents "never differentiated between what boys and girls should do," an attitude underscored by her mother's decision to pursue an advanced degree once Harty and her brother started school.

Socioeconomic status can, in fact, complicate the definition of "diversity." PepsiCo Inc. CEO (and former CFO) Indra Nooyi, for example, was born and reared in India and is representative of a growing class of affluent, well-educated internationals who, while small in number, may have little in common with U.S.-born Hispanics and African-Americans, who have historically been at a relative socioeconomic disadvantage.

Members of those latter groups often count themselves lucky to have attended college at all. Both Munoz of CSX and Derica Rice, CFO of Eli Lilly and an African-American, were the first in their families to attend college. "When I was in high school, a guidance counselor asked me if I had ever thought about going to college, and I said, 'What's a college?'" recalls Munoz.

Role models for minorities remain scarce. James Bell, CFO of $63 billion Boeing Corp., didn't meet many business executives, much less a CFO, growing up in south-central Los Angeles. He majored in accounting at California State University simply because that seemed like a solid route to employment. Rice, an engineering major, planned to go to law school after graduation, and applied to the MBA program at Indiana University only because one of his roommates was applying to similar programs.

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