Under Armour employees received an email earlier this year that upended a longstanding company practice: They could no longer charge visits to strip clubs on their corporate cards. Strip-club visits were symptomatic of practices women at Under Armour found demeaning, current and former employees say.
Source: Under Armour’s #MeToo Moment: No More Strip Clubs on Company Dime
The title of this article on the Wall Street Journal’s site undercuts the seriousness of the issues laid out in the post. What I found to be the most overlooked aspect is the fact that superiors were hired based on relationships with the CEO. They weren’t qualified and if I’m a shareholder in UA a lot of the issues the company has encountered in the last three years derive primarily from the fact that people are in positions where they don’t have the background and are simply benefitting from the good old boy network culture that all companies tend to utilize.
I said this when information on Nike’s issues arrived:
The only company in the big three of Nike, adidas, and Under Armour that could have a chance at having more diversity is the company that is the newest: Under Armour. Under Armour was born in the post Civil Rights era. As a matter of fact it was born during a time where people actually felt that things had changed enough that there was real opportunity for everyone. It was born out of the mind of a White football player… where he was the obvious minority. This means that the company should have diversity in its DNA. The reality? It kind of does. Take a look at the executive board at UA: http://investor.underarmour.com/management.cfm UA is actually the only one of the big three that has a person of color and a woman on the executive board. The thing is though, it’s the same person, Kerry Chandler is the Chief Human Resources Officer.
Nike’s Current Diversity Crisis Could Be Happening In Almost Every Major Company | Reality Check
A company like Under Armour has had a chance to be more diverse because as I stated it was born in a different time, by a guy who played college football… instead Kevin Plank did what Phil Knight did before him. He hired based on relationships and the company that actually had a bit of diversity actually lost that small bit of diversity when Kerry Chandler left for the same position at Endeavor.
The next glaring issue here are the words of former employee Drew Greer who stated in very coded language that the company has an issue with diversity, “The industry has a problem, but Under Armour is truly culturally anemic,” Greer’s statement confirms an issue that I’ve found to be at the core of multiple posts I’ve written here on the site about why the company doesn’t seem to grasp how and where to market, or how to make itself more accepted in the culture of cool.
Under Armour also lost their head of Global Brand Advertising in Julian Duncan who took a similar position with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Greer, Duncan and Chandler show an inherent issue with UA that is underscored by the boy’s club behavior of the CEO and the staff around him. The company simply isn’t working like a company born in the 90s. It’s functioning like every other business created at a time when women and Blacks were considered second class citizens. Under Armour has a #metoo issue, but it also has an anemic culture of hiring people who the entire structure of the company appears to be based around.
That’s my coded language for asking where are the Black people at Under Armour?
When you think about “protecting this house,” the person who comes to mind is Ray Lewis.
When you think about basketball at Under Armour (Under Armour’s best performing division for footwear), the people who come to mind are Steph and now Embiid and Mo Bamba. Initially it was Brandon Jennings.
When you think about the performance category for women the person most associated with that is Misty Copeland.
When you think about the niche category for Under Armour their most exciting person is The Rock.
All of these people are Black. When you take the time to look into the problems that Under Armour has tackling ‘cool’ Drew Greer states in a post on LinkedIn, in regard to their former hires of Black women in C Suite positions as, “- a dance for Wall Street versus addressing the void in their core leadership which in the long run will better their brand, culture and business.”
Now that the covers have been taken off of the brand and the world has been exposed to Under Armour’s culture of oppression for both women and Blacks, the brand will not be able to overcome this without a drastic change for the company. I expect that in the next week as the stock price begins to bleed value, UA will have to make a move more extreme than Nike firing Trevor Edwards. There will have to be a top down adjustment. Unfortunately, the fact is the firings won’t fix the problems that lie at the root of the issues for UA. The company that was born after Nike, adidas, New Balance and is the youngest in all of the major footwear and apparel companies in the industry decided to abandon the built in opportunity of being born in the 90s. Under Armour chose to function like every company seeking to capitalize on the Black dollar; Under Armour created an atmosphere that says ‘use them in the ads and marketing, but don’t let them in the door to solve problems and give the company a true access to culture.’
While everyone will rightfully look at Under Armour spending shareholder money to fund sexploits while mistreating women, I’m looking at the fact that once again diversity and sexism problems in the footwear industry have been brought up again and the WSJ, as other news outlets will, completely miss the point that in the last year or so every Black hire in a prominent position at Under Armour is gone.
I expected this from companies like Nike and adidas where the good old boy network is entrenched, but it’s disheartening to see the new kid on the block be the worst culprit. Nike has been able to weather the storm by co-opting Equality issues via their Just Do It campaign. Under Armour may have a UA shield as a logo, but they don’t have the history to overcome this.
