'You’re talked to as if you are a junior' - The Colour of Power

Esther is a working mother with a high-level qualification and 20 years of experience in her industry. But she believes her career has plateaued – and has no doubt as to the principal reason for this.

“I totally believe diversity is dead,” Esther wrote in response to the Guardian’s request for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workers’ experiences of office life. In a phone call, she expanded on that comment: “A lot of black graduates come in and they don’t last long, because they don’t get mentored. One of them didn’t have a car and he was taking two hours to get in. It was: ‘Oh, he’s lazy.’ People use that to alienate the black graduates.”

Esther says diversity is a buzzword: her company proclaims that it “wants to fill positions with people of colour”, and she has sat through “presentations where they go on and on about it”. But, she says, that message doesn’t translate into the core of the profession’s daily practice.

This should, perhaps, come as no surprise, given the dramatic under-representation of BAME people in Britain’s positions of power. New research conducted by the Guardian and Operation Black Vote has found just 3.5% non-white faces at the top of the UK’s leading 1,000+ organisations, compared with 12.9% in the general population. The scarcity is much worse along gender lines, with less than a quarter of those BAME positions of power occupied by women.

In 2009, the Department for Work and Pensions embarked on an experiment, seemingly motivated by a desire to understand the causes of this longstanding problem. Under the leadership of the then work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper, civil servants concocted more than 2,000 fake job applications in response to 1,000 real vacancies across multiple sectors, professions and pay grades. According to the Mail on Sunday, officials entered very similar (made-up) CVs for each job, “one under a traditional Anglo-Saxon name, and [another] using an ethnic minority-sounding name”.

The backlash to this initiative was immediate. Image-conscious business leaders labelled the research “unethical”. Theresa May, then the Conservative shadow minister for work and pensions, called the project “a waste of taxpayers’ cash”.

The results, however, appeared conclusive. Applicants with white, British-sounding names were far more likely to be called to interview for a position than their ethnic minority counterparts.

More recent analyses show that similar, drastic racial disparities are still thriving in quarters far beyond the application stage. At the end of last year, a report by the centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange concluded that, despite a growing BAME middle class, ethnic minorities in highly skilled, well-paid professions are concentrated at the bottom level of senior management roles.

In June, the Guardian asked people who felt affected by this glass ceiling to write in with their experiences. Those who spoke did so on the condition of anonymity, and names have been changed as a result. This self-selecting sample skewed towards those in middle-class professions who were well into their career trajectories – and their responses were both raw and revealing.

In her recent review of race in the workplace, Baroness McGregor-Smith found that people of colour are much more likely to be overqualified for their jobs than white counterparts, who often advance up the ladder of promotion with ease. In other words, BAME talent is not necessarily lacking in abundance, but it is seriously lacking in support.

It is a statement that resonates with Esther. “They’ll never make you more senior,” she says. “When you ask, ‘Why aren’t you giving me a more senior role?’, they just put up blockers and say, ‘Well, we do know you wanted to go to the next stage, but we don’t think you’re management material.’ I have graduates who work with me who, after two years, are in the same position as me. They tell me straight up: ‘I don’t have to answer to you.’”

‘There’s the covert form of exclusion, which is particularly what I have found – not being invited to things’

Michelle is the second-most senior member of staff in her healthcare organisation, and the only woman of colour at a senior level. She says she is constantly treated as though she is a junior. “A disproportionate number of junior staff are female and of colour. You’re talked to as if you are a junior and they get very upset if you highlight that you’re not.” The latest research from the Trades Union Congress corroborates this, reporting that more than a third of BAME people surveyed felt they had been bullied, abused or singled out for unfair treatment at work because of their race.

Michelle cites a culture of exclusion as the reason she feels stuck. “People say the boardroom is where you have the discussion, and the golf club is where you make the decision. Well, if you don’t even know where the boardroom is, you can’t even have the discussion.

“Being excluded comes in many forms,” she says. “Obviously, there’s the overt form of pushing somebody out the door: the ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ sign. And then there’s the covert form, which is particularly what I have found – not being invited to things. There’s not a thing they have done that I could ever take to HR, and that’s exactly the way they want it. If it was any other way, then I would have a case.”

Her experience mirrors Esther’s, who says many of her colleagues arrange games of golf outside of work. “It’s more Caucasian-based,” she says. “It’s public school-boy based.”

For tech worker Adam, whose extensive experience includes a run in the UK arm of a technology giant, a company buyout led to a drastic change in its culture. “There is a kind of ‘bro’ culture, a ‘white bro’ culture,” he says of the company now. Adam had a decade’s worth of experience and was working alongside a team of 10 colleagues when the redundancies began. They seemed to have very little to do with the company’s efficiency, he says, and everything to do with who looked like his new boss. “It was always the minorities [who were made redundant], whether that’s the women or the ethnic minorities.”

When it was Adam’s turn to be let go, he used data protection legislation to ask for evidence to justify his redundancy. “There was nothing negative in any appraisals for myself, or my black female colleague, and anyone else who [my boss] got rid of. So I went back to them and said, ‘You’ve got nothing here at all, so what is the reason?’’’

Upon discovering that his boss had made untrue assertions about him, Adam chose to escalate. “I went to HR and said: ‘I’ve got detailed notes of that exact conversation, so I know he’s lying.’ This bounced around HR for a fair amount of weeks; then they came back with: ‘Tell us your number. What do you need to make this problem go away?’’ Among the respondents to our call-out, Adam’s clear claim of discrimination, loss of employment and a concrete payout is rare.

‘He said, anyone with an African-sounding name, don’t call them’

For those in public-facing positions, racism from clients, customers or service users can be seen as an occupational hazard – with colleagues either participating, or turning a blind eye.

As an IT recruiter, Ray’s job involves placing the right candidate at the right company. He found that discriminatory attitudes had a concrete effect on how his colleagues did their jobs. While shortlisting candidates for a position, he says, a colleague briskly intervened: “He said no, don’t call these people … anyone with an African-sounding name, they’re just a complete waste of time. Don’t call them.”

According to Ray, his company “wouldn’t shortlist anyone with an African name and put them forward to the client, so the client’s not getting the best talent. They’re getting a list of candidates based on ability, but also on the conscious bias of the particular person who is actually doing the resourcing.”

Such attitudes were also prevalent among his clients, he says. “For a role in Nigeria from a French company, the guy said to me: ‘We’re looking for people – how can I put this – blond hair, blue eyes, yeah?’” When asked if he openly challenged this kind of request, Ray sounds defeated: “My job would be threatened as someone who’s new. It’s my word against someone who’s bringing millions of pounds into the company. They’ll just get rid of me. So, it was very, very difficult to actually say anything.

“You’d be surprised at how many recruiters hear this kind of request all of the time, across countries, across industries,” Ray says. “They don’t say anything because they look at the money. You’re looking at people making £200,000, £300,000 a year in recruitment – if a client’s got a specific request, which perhaps that individual doesn’t agree with, they go along with it and ignore a lot of things that are said.”

According to Ray, his management team “were part of it, to be honest. They turned around to me and said: ‘You’re OK, you’re one of us.’ It was very, very difficult to work in that environment, and that was the last straw for me.”

Isaiah used to work on widening access to top professions with young people, but began to think of the work as futile. Worried about retribution, he chose not to disclose his current profession, or how long he had been working in it. “You can never prove [discrimination],” he says. “That’s something I think people don’t understand – and it adds to the psychological load. You think it’s down to race, but it could be down to a number of other things.”

Michelle has tried to take complaints of racist comments from her service users to her superiors, but hasn’t had much luck. “They say, ‘Oh, they didn’t mean it’ – which I think is even worse than saying, ‘What can you do?’ In one sense, they’re maybe acknowledging you have a right to be distressed – but there are others who tell you you’re either imagining it or you’re reading too much into it, you’re too sensitive.”

“I wish it was back in the 80s, when someone just showed you they didn’t like you,” says Esther. “It’s like you always have to second-guess yourself.”

Michelle is simply fatigued: “I’ve had my car scratched, I’ve been spat at when I was shopping. Yet those things, while they’re all obviously very unpleasant, they really don’t leave the same impact as the more subtle forms of exclusion.”

‘I look at our reports from 30 years ago and think, what’s changed?’

Fourteen per cent of Britain’s working-age population is BAME. In bustling multicultural cities such as London and Birmingham, that figure rises to 40%. Business in The Community, the Prince of Wales’s responsible business network, published research on race in the workplace in 2015, and the organisation’s race equality director, Sandra Kerr, is optimistic and full of positive ideas for change.

First, she says, businesses “should look at monitoring appraisals and performance reviews to see if there’s any [racial] disparity – and investigate why. But I’m also really pushing for reverse-mentoring: senior leaders being mentored by BAME people. When I think about the people I’ve reverse-mentored, telling them my experiences was shocking for them – they were, like: ‘You’re talented, what’s the problem?’ Some of it was outside their experience.”

“You spend most of your day at work, and it has such a big mental health toll on individuals if they feel they’re not welcomed by the workplace culture,” says Farah Elahi, a research and policy analyst at the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust. “I look at some of our reports from 20, 30 years ago and I just think: ‘How have things changed?’”

Elahi suggests moving post-work socialising space away from alcohol-based activities. “People I’ve spoken to find other forms of common ground. For example, using football as a space to bond with colleagues.” The Inequality Project: the Guardian's in-depth look at our unequal world Read more

For Kerr, the business solution to a hostile work environment is accountability. “One of the things we’ve recommended is performance objectives for managers. It helps to focus minds. As a good leader, you need to ensure you are including all members of your team in opportunities.”

Elahi agrees: “Without accountability, no one’s doing anything. Even if they’re sympathetic, they’re not putting actions into place. That’s why we haven’t seen the progress we’d like to see. It’s not just about name-blind CVs. You have to win over hearts and minds, because you need people to understand the reality that it’s not an even playing field,” Elahi adds. “That’s something we’ve still not cut through on. People still find it difficult to understand that it’s not about giving someone advantage – it’s about levelling that playing field.”

Reni Eddo-Lodge

• Some names in this article were changed at the interviewees’ request.

Republished from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/26/employees-on-workplac...

The Colour of Power is a joint partnership by Operation Black Vote, Green Park and the Guardian.