To be anxious about my work's lack of diversity?

[hellokitty67]

I work for a listed firm - we are well known and respected in our field.

Our specific department is quite elitist and we do our own independent hiring (60 people in my department). They hire mainly from Oxbridge and a few London universities.

We have a huge issue with diversity, there are 3 women. We have a few Asians but they are all international students from wealthy backgrounds. 90% of the department are white males.

I knew we had an issue with private school hiring, as I think there's only a few of us who went to state school. However, I looked through our graduate intake for September... our biggest hiring to date, every single one of the 15 went to private school.

I feel really sad. I'm in charge of coming up with a scheme to improve our diversity. How do I broach this subject - we have a class issue surely? I just think it's shocking.

I do not believe that out of every person who did the relevant degree and applied that only private school educated grads were the best.

I am the token pupil premium, BAME girl.

Thanks.

Reading with interest - we’re about to recruit - small company, highly skilled staff - so far all known before approached - our talent pool is all white male, it’s that kind of industry but we want to shake things up. We will be redacting names and education from the first cut. How do we attract more diverse talent? Paying a headhunter? We may have to!

Or ask your managers exactly how doing this will support you with your career goals/promotion prospects/profile building. Is your specialism HR? If not, Don't get sucked into doing the soft stuff that isn't valued when you could be doing technical work or building networks in your industry/organisation.

@Herewefall

Reading with interest - we’re about to recruit - small company, highly skilled staff - so far all known before approached - our talent pool is all white male, it’s that kind of industry but we want to shake things up. We will be redacting names and education from the first cut. How do we attract more diverse talent? Paying a headhunter? We may have to!

Make sure your website has photos of women and non-white people. Guarantee an interview for all suitably qualified BAME and female applicants.

"Anxious" is a bit of a mimsy word...isn't "appalled" or "angry" better? I agree with @LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett- go somewhere that values you.

I heard about a working-class-background woman who got into an employer as second reserve for their graduate intake. After a while, they realised she was one of the best and they had nearly missed out on employing her. They decided to talk to her about the application and interview process and identified a number of ways in which it worked against someone like her, and took steps to change things. I think with her company they realised they were rating people more highly for knowing lots about the job and the sector, which was something some people had because of family connections, but didn't actually have much bearing on their ability to do the work.

Look carefully at the recruitment process, and see what aspects of it may be measuring things that are more about "are you like us" and less about "could you be trained to do this job well".
Hopefully you can pinpoint things that can be changed in your company's process.

@Settleandcalm has given excellent advice

Place marking as the question is a good one and so are the responses!

If you're part of HR, you're part of the problems. Kids from fancy expensive schools tend to ooze self confidence and that's how they excel at the interview game. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds tend to be more reserved, have less immaculate accents and may thus appear less polished.

Who are your sponsors in this project?
Unless they are very senior I wouldn't start to lean in and tackle this problem.
Is this more than a feel good tick box exercise for senior management?

This is a major cultural shift for your organization and not one you are going to be able to do by yourself.

Class is the most unspoken about bias in society.

Everyone is always keen to talk about race, gender, sexuality - not so much about the fact that there is a huge swathe of the population that have no opportunities of all, then a huge swathe that have some opportunity but are frustrated at every obstacle because they don't have the connections, money and soft skills to progress.

It frustrates me how few working class people we see in public life. Even previously relatively open industries such as music have become middle class.

So they picked the BAME woman to sort this out?

Not the 60 year old white boy with his network of, hmm, Old White Boys?

Some small commiseration I know but class issues exist in different ways.

The company I just finished working for was 37 men, 4 women. There were no bame and having a degree is something it is prudent to keep quiet about.

Previous posters are right, you are the only person who sees an issue, so pushing for change may do you material harm.

I feel really sad. I'm in charge of coming up with a scheme to improve our diversity

I absolutely would not do this. My workplace broached the subject with me. I calmly told them to get an expert in, and pay them.

Bloody cheek.

Do you know if people other than privately educated middle class white males are applying or are they applying and not being selected for interview, or are they being interviewed and not being recruited?

Employers are often guilty of employing 'people like us' and hence the domination of middle class white men perpetuates.

But I agree that class discrimination is the great unspoken issue and I've seen many threads on here with comments about the perceived shortcomings of working class people where I've thought 'I hope the person who said that isn't involved in recruitment' as they openly admit to discriminating against working class people or those perceived as being so.

This was a subject of a recent TUC campaign and you may find something useful at

www.tuc.org.uk/news/tuc-calls-ban-class-discrimination

What LonnyVonny said ^^ why do BAME socially mobile women have to take on the Labour of recruiting. Agree blind candidate sifting, assessment tasks and diverse panel. Consider using a diverse specialist HR company to do your re recruitment campaign and advertise job in diverse media possibly consider placing ad in Mumsnet Jobs?!

Also the advert language can put off potential applicants and there are online tools to make job as wording less "masculine". I think it was Thames Water who used this approach and ended up with.more female trainee engineering apprentices and graduates.

@BameChange123

Also the advert language can put off potential applicants and there are online tools to make job as wording less "masculine". I think it was Thames Water who used this approach and ended up with.more female trainee engineering apprentices and graduates.

Thank you that's really useful, I'll look into that.

Best person for the job. Every single time.

hire mainly from Oxbridge and a few London universities

Why?

@Herewefall and @BameChange123 BP (surprisingly enough) have done masses of work on how they recruit as there is a board-level recognition that recruiting the same thinking is going to basically mean the end of their organisation, eventually. They've put millions into this yet still haven't quite met their diversity targets (which is what I mean when I say OP can't change this by herself). They are making progress though.

'De-masculining' job roles was one of the first things they did. All hiring managers do anti-bias training too. They've also worked hard to change the 'tap on the shoulder' culture whereby someone would suggest someone else should apply for a job, primarily because those recommendations tended to be bias-based. For example, someone wouldn't suggest a new mother for a role in another country. This is particularly interesting as it goes against all the usual 'networking' activity that tends to happen in large organisations where people will recommend people they know to hirers. Critically, diversity targets are included in managers KPIs.

Again - I know I'm sounding like a broken record here - this is large-scale, planned and systematic change. No individual can achieve this on their own.

Thanks @Titchy My first thought was we have only photos of our staff on the website - we have a couple of woman but all faces are white and then I noticed we have hands and legs and they are all white too - will see if we can have that altered - it's not something we have thought about but it seems so obvious!
We haven't done an open recruitment before - all staff recruited so far have been known to us beforehand...will have a think about guaranteeing maybe a number or percentage of suitably qualified BAME/woman for interview - at the moment we have no idea what the response is going to be (small company, dh has high profile though) - so I think the first sift process (redacted name and University) will need to be decided on the number of CVs we receive.

I agree with this

they realised they were rating people more highly for knowing lots about the job and the sector, which was something some people had because of family connections, but didn't actually have much bearing on their ability to do the work.

and this

Make sure your website has photos of women and non-white people. Guarantee an interview for all suitably qualified BAME and female applicants.

It is too easy to select people who know stuff or have had opportunities because of family connections or money or location.

Around 50% of Oxbridge people are state educated so there is no reason why 50% of your intake shouldn't be.
If you are selecting from Oxbridge or similar then you don't even need to know school or GCSE or A level results, so have a form that doesn't even ask for them.

• Outreach to get applications
• Positive discrimination to ensure candidates get interviewed
• Interview based on aptitude not old boy network knowledge

Oxbridge universities are considered the very best aren't they, with the toughest entry requirements?
If so, then it's not surprising employers would want their alumni.

Moon
But that doesn't explain lack of state school or female.
It might explain lack of BAME.