Financial firm to give Spelman $10 million

                                Spelman College 

Hoping to increase the numbers of black women entering the financial services industry, Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. today will announce a $10 million gift — the largest in the firm's 157-year history — to Spelman College.

The donation to the historically black, all-female Atlanta college — which also is the single-largest corporate donation Spelman has received — will create the Lehman Bros. Center for Global Finance and Economic Development at the school.

In addition to the development of an interdisciplinary program that will ultimately become a major, Lehman's gift will be used to hire new faculty, establish scholarships and create a Chinese-language instruction program, said Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman's president.

"For me, this is yet another step in identifying a place where black women have been underrepresented and creating new opportunities," Tatum said in an interview Tuesday. She noted that in the past the school addressed gaps in nursing, sciences and mathematics that needed a pipeline of black women.

While it's difficult to gauge how many black women are in financial services — even Lehman wouldn't say how diverse its work force is — the numbers of African-Americans overall is small. Blacks make up 7 percent of officials and managers in the banking and credit subsector — the largest of any segment in the financial services industry, according to a report issued last year by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The lowest representation is in the securities subsector, with 4.4 percent of managers and officials in that field being African-American, the report showed.

In a global economy, diversity isn't just about race and ethnicity; women, particularly black women, have a role to play, too, Tatum said.

"The underrepresentation of women of African descent is broad; it's not limited to just one aspect of financial services," she said. "It's not just about hiring students, it's really about creating a broad opportunity for women of color to participate in economic development globally as well as domestically."

New York-based Lehman Bros., an investment banking powerhouse that reported total assets of $605.9 billion at the end of the second quarter and more than 28,300 employees worldwide, said it's making a statement that corporations can help drive change.

"It's because there are so many elements that have contributed to why there is underrepresentation in the financial services industry among women of African descent and other segments of the population that we created a partnership," Scott J. Freidheim, Lehman's co-chief administrative officer, said in an interview.

"We think it is a wonderful opportunity to create a corporate-academic partnership that helps in one of the most important issues that the country faces today."

As part of the agreement, Spelman students will be paired with mentors from Lehman and be tapped for international and domestic internships.

The center, which will be housed in Spelman's Milligan Building, is expected to launch next fall as an interdisciplinary curriculum, school officials said. The goal is to spin it out as a stand-alone major by 2013. The Chinese-language program was included because of the center's global focus, officials said.

"This is not just about any one of the elements that we're going to accomplish together," Freidheim said. "This is about creating a model that will hopefully serve as a wonderful example of how to make a difference."

AJC.com

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