The danger is that if the senior leadership team is predominantly white and male, they’ll lean back on their old biases and see it as the responsibility of their ethnic minority workers to fix the problem when that shouldn’t be the case. For example, if there aren’t enough women at the top of the business, most companies set up a career development program and assign them a sponsor to boost their confidence. They don’t look at the culture of the organization and say ‘We’re not good at flexible working, which may be contributing to holding you back’. The same applies to race and ethnicity. It’s about bias within the system, but no one’s talking about that. They talk about how individuals should adapt.
Toby Mildon, Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) expert
