The 25 most diverse companies in the US

Diversity is good for business.

"If you manage a company to be as fair as possible, then you will have the best possible workforce, the best possible customers, the best possible suppliers, and the smartest investors," explains Luke Visconti, CEO and founder of DiversityInc.

To find the companies that are doing this particularly well, DiversityInc invited thousands of companies to fill out a survey with roughly 300 questions. Over 1,600 companies participated in this year's survey, which measured human capital in seven variables, including gender and race; fairness and equity from recruitment to development and retention; and supplier diversity.

"If you're looking for job, or an investment opportunity, or a company to do business with, this list is very important," Visconti says. "It's metrics-driven, and the ranking primarily reflects fairness in human capital results, including five levels of management."

Here are the 25 most diverse companies in the US:

The DiversityInc Top 50 companies are significantly more diverse than the average American corporation. Compared with statistics from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, these companies have 20% more Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in management, and 13% more women. At the top 10 companies, the contrast is even greater, with 41% more Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, and 46% more women than the average US company.

Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation ranks No. 1 this year.

"They're consistently high performers across everything we measure, but what is most noteworthy about them is that they have a woman CEO and 60% of her direct reports are women," Visconti says. "For a scientific company, this is amazing performance - but keep in mind that women have earned more bachelor's degrees than men since the late 1980s. If everything were fair, and corporate America truly selected for talent and accomplishments, most Fortune 500 companies would look like this."