Plans for Progress & Dow

In 1968, Dow president H.D. (Ted) Doan spoke about the company’s commitment to equal employment opportunities, saying, “…we cannot ignore the society in which we live or shirk our share of the responsibility for its ill… Each one of us has an obligation to observe the spirit, as well as the letter, of our Company’s policy and our country’s laws.” Doan had more than words to offer; he had data showing Dow’s strides toward greater diversity.

Dow voluntarily participated in the federal Plans for Progress, an early nondiscrimination objective of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO). William H. Satterlee, Dow’s director of Corporate Personnel Services, told Dow Diamond that the company was committed to hiring qualified minority personnel, but he worried that,

“Our biggest problem will be convincing minority groups that opportunity exists at Dow.”

By 1967, one out of every three net gained in employment was nonwhite, and of those, one out of six was Black. Doan did not consider the program as simply filling quotas; rather, he expected that new and valuable skills and insight would come to the company through diversity in hiring. He would not consider it a success until nonwhite employees were hired at all levels of the company and served on equal footing with their white colleagues.

Dow initiated several training and recruitment programs. They began seeking qualified scientists from HBCUs, and they also created training programs in predominately Black communities, like Saginaw, to teach high school students basic professional skills that they could parlay into administrative jobs. The instruction included classroom work and Dow internships. Young women from Saginaw high schools did jobs such as answering phones, and filing, along with data processing code work and data collection. Other programs to provide adult training found success in Houston and Cleveland.