The industry needs to pull its socks up and choose candidates that will ‘add to the blend of talents on board rather than repeat what is already there’
Despite a promising start our industry still has a long way to go to rebalance the gender and diversity gap – the one between our management, our staff, our passengers and the population.
We have had some good moments – in my time at FirstGroup our PLC Board members in charge of bus and rail (Nicola Shaw and Mary Grant) were women. We have had until recently a female Senior Traffic Commissioner. Yet it remains an uphill struggle to get anything like acceptable diversity in our management.
Under-represented
In the world women produce 50% of the food and 43% of the agricultural work force. Yet they remain thoroughly under-represented in senior management – in Europe only one in three are in senior roles in business.
Using 2016 data, 69% of babies born in London have at least one non-white parent, yet white males still dominate senior management in the private and public sectors.
Evidence shows that balanced boards of major companies are 35% more successful than those which are not.
Most recently I was invited to speak at the Women in Rail in Malaysia conference by the pioneering Natasha Zulkifli, who has done so much to promote opportunities for people in fields they have previously felt excluded from. How inspiring it was to have young Muslim women in significant numbers in the audience asking how they could get into typically white male roles – in particular in civil engineering, highway engineering and many others.
Too often the answer is: “Well if they don’t apply, there is nothing we can do”. I recently sat at a Charity Trustee meeting where the response from the all-male constituency was that the democratic process did what it did and nothing can be done about it.
This is nonsense. “What else can we do?” is what white men say when they don’t want to face up to the challenges and think more radically. People recruit in their own image. A predominantly white, male management, committee or group of people will inadvertently recruit, choose or vote for people like themselves.
There are numerous small steps which can be taken. Too many job titles imply only men can be successful in the process. Too many job descriptions paint a picture that discourages non-white male candidates from applying.
More enlightened organisations welcome diversity and chose candidates that will add to the blend of talents on board rather than repeat what is already there. In so doing they signal an acceptance that it is important to represent the workforce in general and the population at large. How else are we to recognise the needs of the users and those who deliver the service?
Time for change
It is therefore time for our industry to embrace the rich culture of different backgrounds to create a management team, a PLC Board, a committee, where there is a deliberate bias away from older white men (of which I am one,) so that we have a different perspective, other ideas, greater input and greater opportunities for so many people who want to succeed in transport.
There is good work being done by many organisations, but it is still too little. We need much more effort and we should be making a loud noise about successes in this area.
And to quote Dr David Rock: “Unless you are proactively including, you are probably accidentally excluding”.
