Sometimes they call me BME, sometimes BAME, sometimes it’s POC. Often people don’t know what to call me at all. But my favourite, is when someone says I’m a ‘diverse’ person. How can one person represent diversity?
I’m one of the few black people in my office. The reality of the work environment for ‘diverse’ people like me is that our hiring can sometimes feel like an exercise in box-ticking. Not something that’s indicative of real change, but a way for companies to flex and say: “Look at our diverse staff, there’s the black person.”
The issue is that many workplaces are confusing diversity for inclusion. Getting a ‘diverse’ person onto your payroll is not a quick fix. That’s the problem for organisations like the one I work for: they think that hiring me is the answer to their problems, rather than committing to an examination of whether they need to change entire practices and even their leadership team. True inclusion would make it feel normal here for me.
I am at a junior level in the hierarchy of my workplace. Given that I’m relatively young, that’s what you might expect. But I see men who are in a similar age bracket occupying more senior positions – but not any black woman at those levels or above. Am I meant to believe that not one black woman possesses the leadership skills or the specialist knowledge to occupy a position of power in my organisation?
Friends report the same lack of diversity when it comes to more powerful positions in their workplaces too. It make me wonder: if my peers are experiencing this type of pessimistic work malaise so early in their careers, how many others are also experiencing it? And how many will end up quitting, thinking that senior roles are out of reach for them?
It isn’t just race and gender that are out of whack when it comes to corporate power equality. There is no point recruiting people who likely share the same outlook and educational privileges as the more traditionally white middle class office archetype, but have a different ethnic background. I’ve observed a black woman in my office espouse the same ideas that I hear every day of the working week from my white colleagues.
I think we need to look at class when making hiring decisions. But unlike those who say we should look at class as well as gender and race, I advocate looking at class because of gender and race. These things are not in competition; I believe they often they feed into each other.
For meaningful inclusion, companies need to make brave radical decisions when choosing leaders, rather than reaching for the sticking plaster of ‘diversity’. When more black women are heading up establishments, or more non-graduates are leading teams in professional industries – that is when we can celebrate real movement on the inclusion front. Not by measuring the alphabet soup of ‘diverse’ lower ranking employees in one office building.
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• This column is being published anonymously to allow the author to lift the lid on her experience in a high-profile organisation.