LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Equality and Diversity

June 24th, 2014

The week that was…

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Equality and Diversity

June 24th, 2014

The week that was…

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Several research reports in today’s ‘The week that was…’ – BITC Race at the Top research shows that the ethnicity gap in management positions has widened in the last 5 years, University of Manchester study indicates lack of social mobility among ethnic minorities despite improved educational attainment and ACAS report reveals that disabled workers are less engaged than non-disabled workers.

Business in the Community (BITC) have published the ‘Race at the Top’ report which presents a comprehensive picture of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) representation in leadership in UK business today. Startlingly, it find that there has been virtually no ethnicity change in top management positions in the five years between 2007 and 2012. If anything, the gap at management level seems to have widened. As a response to this report, Race for Opportunity (BITC’s race equality campaign) is calling for a government review into racial barriers in the workplace that is akin to the Lord Davies review into gender, and for two words – ‘and race’ – to be added to the UK Corporate Governance Code.

Tom Legge, Benchmarking Development Manager at BITC, expands on this report and looks into ways businesses can take decisive steps to reduce and remove barriers to ethnic minority progression in their own workplaces, including having open and transparent recruitment processes in place and expanding mentoring to a wide range of employees.

 The Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester has also published a report which claims that despite an increase in education attainment levels, outcomes in the labour market have not improved for ethnic minorities. While Chinese, Indian, Irish, Bangladeshi and black African students are outperforming their white British peers in obtaining five or more GCSEs at grade A* to C, this has not translated into social mobility. Among other interesting findings, the study noted that Black African and black Caribbean women have experienced a 15-20% fall in full-time employment rates over the past decade and that 53% of self-employed Pakistani men work in the transport industry compared to 8% of the rest of the population.

Finally, research conducted by ACAS shows that although employee engagement has increased in recent years, there was a particularly stark gap in terms of disability with disabled employees being far less engaged than the ‘average’ worker. The research is based on analysis of the most recent Workplace Employee Relations Study.

Have something to add? Write to us – Equality.and.Diversity@lse.ac.uk

 

About the author

Equality and Diversity

Posted In: Weekly news

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Bad Behavior has blocked 233 access attempts in the last 7 days.