“Companies like Altria have gone out of their way to emphasize the diversity of their corporate boards and the breadth of their social justice initiatives, from funding minority businesses to promoting transgender women in sports. But Tesla, whose executives are overwhelmingly white men, has resisted that bandwagon, going so far as to fire its top LGBT diversity officer last year.

The ‘S’ in ESG typically includes diversity programs. Philip Morris International, which in 2021 advertised a partnership with ‘African data scientists,’ got a social score of 84 from S&P Global. Tesla got a measly 20.”

[COMMENTARY] The biggest failure of many ESG raters is a failure to rate the ESG impacts of the products and services produced by companies! Hence tobacco companies can outscore Tesla. Fortunately, Corporate Knights and a few other ESG/sustainability rankings will account for such factors.
How Tobacco Companies Are Crushing ESG Ratings, by Aaron Sibarium, June 13, 2023, The Washington Free Beacon, USA.