Who constitutes 'women'? The whitewashing of Gender equality
by Tzeitel Degiovanni, D&I Specialist
‘I was the only woman in the room, now that’s changed’ – reads the title of a recent BBC article, a direct quote from Kelly Becker, President at Schneider Electric (UK & Ireland). Whilst the improvement over the past 5 – 10 years in gender representation in board rooms has certainly been a welcome and timely change, I refrain from using the term ‘women’. Why? Because this is not an improvement that has been seen or enjoyed by all women. As the rather tone deaf (or perhaps blind, in this case) graphic used by the BBC, and provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, quite ironically shows – there has been an increase in the representation and promotion of *white* women in the workforce, with women of colour being left at the wayside of ‘D&I’ efforts. For most women of colour in corporate spaces and Senior leadership positions, the BBC headline would have read ‘I am the only women of colour in the room’, full stop.
Source 1 - As this is the graphic that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy uses to claim that women’s representation has ‘visibly improved’, we have to take this image at face value, for it is pretty surprising that it went through many different people in the government and did not get flagged for its racial homogeneity.
This is a classic BBC’s problems essay. They have many problems here, but one of the first concerns is the article in which the term ‘women’ is too liberally used without validity regarding who these women are and who gets silenced along the way. This remains the case in many media where a person of colour is featured in an article; their race or skin colour is usually the first thing that is highlighted. When it comes to the D & I talk, the Number of tame BAME in an organization is put forward instead of the pretty considerable number of white employees. However, the moment we come to talk about white people or women in this instance, the OED does not do an excellent job of unmarked, unstressed ethnocentricism. The BBC writes the words that “this reflects a broader shift, with women now making up more than a third of top jobs at Britain’s 350 largest businesses”; however, they forgot to mention that this is only white women who make 30% of the management suffocates so clearly indicates that the neck of all these efforts will be the further coloured parsing of race/ ethnicity away from equality overview efforts.
And it is not a new phenomenon. Sojourner Truth was one of many black women abolitionists during the US suffrage movement. Although white women campaigned for independence as men, they meant independence that places women on par and, if not above men, of other races. Sojourner Truth is well known for her, and these are her words. Sojourner, Truth speaking, I quote,
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?”
- 1851 speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio
More than 80 years ahead, from the 1960s to 1980s, when the second wave of feminists pushed for equal opportunity and equal pay. Still black the situation was worse as the black women were subjected to civil rights injustices. The crusade for equal opportunities for the African American people was hampered by segregation, acts of violence, and the denial of the ballot to many as prescribed by the 15th Amendment ratified in 1870.
Examples of groups such as the Combahee River, the Constructed Whiteness activists, and specific clusters of the Civil Rights movement all had Black women activists leading the struggle for their rights since women in general were not included in the so-called ‘women’s’ movement for equality. We are now looking at the same form of exclusion re-packaged – but in 2021, in our hyper-digitalized world that allows us to access this information on demand, shouldn’t we be doing better?
As much as no one has any business stating that society is free of any forms of racial discrimination, few can reliably argue that racism along the lines of cubicles, such as the vanilla boy’s club, doesn’t exist. However, these problems also permeate and encapsulate HR departments and the top management tier within the corporations. There has been a lot of dialogue about prejudice towards people who share similar interests, especially during the recent surge of ‘awareness training’ programs – most of which are based on severity and anecdotes around affinity bias. But how are they reinventing inclination bias, particularly the white men who now understand or are aware that they exhibit bias towards the same race? Usually, they employ Caucasian women. Or what happens when those white men in recruiting and leadership positions are replaced with caucasian women? More often than not, those caucasian women who also went into recruitment would display an inclination towards recruiting the same ethnic majority, and the cycle continues.
In due time, the Vanilla Boys Club will turn into a Vanilla People’s club, and once again, ‘D&I’ practices shall be examined for their blatant misunderstanding of inequalities. Expect verbal political correctness from BBC and other businesses for introducing ‘diversity’ and ‘gender balance’ without actually knowing what it is about. And so it goes until we perform another examination in 5 years, or there is a record of another act of violence, and the public decides to care.