Diversity Officers deserve a medal, not hostility

We heard from a couple of senior members of Government last week on the topic of diversity.?On Sky News Brexit Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, spoke about Civil Service Diversity Officers, saying that they ‘weren’t doing anything useful’.?I don’t disagree with Rees-Mogg’s comment that diversity is the job of people making employment decisions – but he clearly doesn’t understand that Diversity Officers are there to support and enable that exact aim.?And casually sweeping aside a whole profession goes a bit far, frankly.?Maybe there’s some comparison to be made here with the public’s view of ‘all politicians’ …

Why single Diversity Officers out, as a group??As individuals they are surely subject to the same performance review processes as any other Civil Servant – and if they aren’t doing a good job, they need to up their game (assuming the review process is fair, of course).?But I’m very sure that they aren’t all failing hopelessly, as Rees-Mogg suggests.?This type of narrative is pure scapegoating and playing to people’s worst prejudices and most ignorant stereotypes.

And in a Talk TV interview, Attorney General Suella Braverman apparently piggy-backed off the case of the mixed-race engineer who won compensation after being distressed that a Diversity Advocate colleague told her that she must necessarily have experienced oppression because of her ethnicity.?Suella linked this to herself, saying that that no-one should tell her that she has been oppressed because she is an Asian woman.?Of course they shouldn’t, and I wouldn’t imagine that this is a comment she faces regularly.?Certainly, the case reported is seemingly an example of where well-intended allyship went wrong.?But it’s just one case, which should be seen in the context of the thousands of discrimination-related Employment Tribunals which are heard every year.

Suella also claimed that the diversity training she had seen in the Civil Service is ‘tearing up the fabric of our society’.?Again, quite extreme, and also again there seems to be a singular lack of understanding about the objectives and positive impact of meaningful diversity work.?

Good diversity work isn’t crazy ‘woke’ fervour and rigidly telling people what to think; it helps us all to understand that different people have different experiences, based on their identity.?And it also encourages us all to take some responsibility and to come up with solutions to avoid the negative outcomes that we see around us, created by prejudice, bias and stereotyping, and borne out by so many inequality statistics. Surely that’s a win-win for everyone and is the route to creating a fairer, more productive workplace and a respectful, cohesive society.

It's also been pointed out that on a more practical level, getting rid of diversity training increases the risk to organisations of discrimination claims succeeding, and consequently of them attracting liability, with associated financial penalties and damage to reputation.?Ensuring that staff are advised on the types of behaviour that are and aren’t acceptable is a key aspect of showing that ‘reasonable steps’ have been taken to avoid discrimination in the workplace.?

I took the opportunity to look up the latest employee profile figures across the Civil Service (2021).?The Senior Civil Service has 6.1% disabled staff, (in the context of 14.7% of the working population being disabled).?The figure in one Government Department is 2.7%.?And on ethnicity, the Senior Civil Service has representation of 8.2% ethnic minority employees, with the Treasury figure at 2.9%.?Of course, this is just one set of indicators in one sector – there are many more that show us the work still to do on diversity, let alone on inclusion.?Vilification of the ‘DEI sector’ as a ‘new religion’ seems at best a misguided way to approach the challenges that valuable Diversity Officers are so constructively and resiliently addressing.?In my view they deserve a medal, not hostility.