Shereen Daniels - The Anti-Racist Organization

Brilliant. Killing two birds with one stone. Let's have some of that. The job is done. Mission accomplished; you now have a diverse team.

But it is pretence. It's too easy. And it's lazy.

When we asked about the single most important attribute being prioritised in the board's next director search, racial/ethnic diversity topped the list (25%). It ranked higher than traditional areas like industry expertise (20%) and operational expertise (14%). Gender diversity ranked much lower, at 12%, perhaps because boards have done a lot of work to bring on female directors in the past few years – if only one or two .

PWC Corporate Directors Survey, 2021 ( pwc.com)

Due to the ease of visual representation, for years we've ended up with these surface‐level gestures of racial equity and after the summer of 2020, we just amped it up a bit more. Note also that the term ‘racial equity’ came later, amid concern that the word ‘racism’ was too divisive.

That approach of doing of something merely to garner output is no longer enough. The representational box‐ticking exercise of ‘how many Black people are on your board’ doesn't cut it anymore. It's tokenistic, transactional and non‐transformative. It advances absolutely nothing.

Therein lies the difference between tokenism and representation. Representation is important. In context.

You should be asking why it is seemingly impossible for anyone who does not look like the majority of your colleagues to progress above first‐ or second‐line management positions.

Why are there few or no Black leaders on your board?

Why are you so keen on emphasising proportional representation?

What are the retention and promotion rates for Black colleagues?

What are they paid, relative to their white counterparts?

Who is asking those questions to your line managers, heads of department and functional directors?

Who rubber‐stamps the answers? Someone must do, if very little has changed.

What you do with the answers to these questions will determine how serious you are about dismantling systemic racism within your workplace.

Suddenly promoting or hiring more Black people is not the answer. There's more to it than that.

1 McKinsey & Company. (17 June 2021). The Economic State of Black America. Retrieved 14 September 2021, from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/the-economic-state-of-black-america-what-is-and-what-could-be.

2 Office for National Statistics. (December 2021). Labour market overview, UK. Retrieved 14 September 2021, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest.

3 PwC's Annual Corporate Directors Survey. (2021). Retrieved 6 January 2022, from https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/governance-insights-center/library/annual-corporate-directors-survey.html.

4 US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. Retrieved 14 September 2021, from https://www.bls.gov/cps/.

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