A lack of diversity: how would you react?

My regular readers will know that I do a lot of networking as part of my work, I love going to events: it is a fun way to meet new people. Whilst there's no guarantee that you'll meet relevant people every time, I do often manage to walk away from each event with at least a handful of useful new contacts. It is also a good way to catch up with people I regularly see on these networking events - so last night, I was at an event which included a dinner. The food was rather bland, but at least there were plenty of interesting people at the event for me to meet. I'm not going to name the event (as I was a guest of one of the sponsors), but I made an interesting observation. In the banquet hall, there were many tables and on each table, there were ten guests. I went round the room trying to count the following: how many women there were on average on each table and how many people of ethnic minority there were at each table. Now depending on how well you know London or the financial services sector here, the results I will reveal here may or may not shock you.

Some tables had more women than others (notably, my table had none), but on average there are about 2.5 women per table when you average out the entire banquet hall. Given that half of the population is female, that does mean that women are very under-represented in banking - but that's something we already know. Now as for how many people of ethnic minority per table, well forget counting it by table, including myself, I counted four people of ethnic minority (all men) and amongst the four, three were South Asian (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/etc) looking and then there's myself (I am mixed but mostly Chinese). There wasn't a single black or Asian woman at the event. So, it wouldn't surprise you at all to learn that the banking sector in London is dominated by older, upper/middle class white men and people like myself, I'm a very rare minority in this world. I'm Asian, I'm an immigrant, I'm openly gay, I have very working class parents, I'm autistic: as I was a child growing up, if you had asked anyone if I could have all those characteristics and still work in the world of banking dominated by posh, rich, older white men, people would probably think that was impossible - but yet here I am, being the only gay, Asian, autistic, immigrant in the room again and quite happily fitting in. So as I left the event tonight, I have three reactions to what I have observed: I'm not saying there's a right or wrong answer here, I just want to know how you would react (or if I have not covered your reaction, do let me know in the comments section).

A) This is terrible, we must get more women and ethnic minorities into banking!

This is pretty much the standard, politically correct response that we see in the mainstream media who will automatically deplore the lack of diversity in any sector: from the top universities to the government to the banking industry. This is because most people would assume that ethnic minorities and women are kept from these top positions because of racism and sexism, thus any left-wing, progressive person would want to stand up for equality by demanding that we eradicate such bigotry from our civilized, modern society. The question I want to ask though, is whether or not this racism and sexism is genuine or imagined? Is this really such a hostile place for women and people of ethnic minority to work? I want to be careful and avoid mansplaining the issue here about women, I don't want to speak on behalf of women working in banking but yeah, they are in the minority and tend to be certain roles like marketing and administration rather than others. I would say that the company I'm working for is actually doing really well in this aspect given that we're 53% male and 47% female, the moment we hire one more woman and the women will be in the majority the company! But obviously, compared to the other companies I have observed at the event yesterday, then clearly we are very different.

As for ethnic minorities, I really struggle to get my head around this one. Now the banking sector in the UK is dominated by members of the upper-middle class, it is one of the sectors that the social elites typically work in, because it has always been so lucrative. I have never ever encountered any company with a policy of deliberately discriminating against anyone who isn't white - nonetheless, most companies expect you to fit in if you want to work there. That means being able to speak, dress and behave like a posh, upper class person - this is the part which I find most fascinating. This is discrimination on the basis of social class and NOT skin colour, that's not the same thing! My regular readers will know that I was brought up in a very working class family in Ang Mo Kio in Singapore, I'm autistic, I'm Hokkien-speaking, I didn't have fine manners, I was the complete opposite of 'posh'. Yet thankfully, I learnt something incredible during my two years at VJC (wow I actually did something useful in school) - I did theatre studies & drama (TSD) as an 'A' level subject and yeah, you could be the Ah Beng from Ang Mo Kio at home, but when you get on that stage, you have to convince the audience that you are Henry V - that's called acting. A good actor can convince people that he is the character he is playing and of course, not everyone has the talent to be that convincing when acting. It would obviously be easier for me to play the role of say a Singaporean Ah Beng swearing in Hokkien in Ang Mo Kio than for me to pull off Hamlet convincingly but the former would just be me simply being myself, whilst the latter is the true essence of acting.

Am I making it simpler than it sounds? I don't think so. You see, this was actually a pretty vital lesson that I learnt whilst I was in the army - in a nutshell, if you want to fit in, observe the people around you and do exactly what they do. Don't be different, don't stand out like a sore thumb, if you copy them well enough then you would be able to blend it pretty easily. I'm afraid a lot of people don't understand this seemingly basic principle: if you want to work with a bunch of posh, rich people, then you have to make an effort to fit in. What most people do is crash into a job interview like a bull in a china shop, making no effort whatsoever to 'fit in' and then turn around and claim, "hey they didn't hire me despite the fact that I was fucking brilliant - they must be racist." No, you don't get to play the race card in this case. One of my former colleagues was Eton educated and he told me about the incredibly international mix of people he studied with including sons of African oil oligarchs and members of the Nepalese royal family. They never discriminated against anyone on the basis of their skin colour, oh it was all about your wealth and social. You see, many people refuse to even acknowledge that there is this discrimination on the basis of social class because it does put the blame squarely on them for not having come across as refined or posh enough to work in an environment full of posh, rich people. Instead, when they play the race card, they can claim, "Help! I am being victimized because of the colour of my skin!" when really, that isn't the case.

Allow me to show you how this kind of discrimination can work towards white people as well and it is clearly not a case of racism. I have performed the function of the gatekeeper in various occasions in my career and one thing I encounter is bad grammar: that's right, in England, there are English people who do not know how to conjugate their verbs. An example would be the sentence, "you were busy at the event yesterday", some British people would say, "you was busy at the event yesterday". Now it tends to be less educated, working class people who would say "you was" rather than "you were" in such a sentence - mostly because if you had gone to a good school, your English teacher would have corrected that mistake very early on in the process - but if you had gone to a lousy school where the teachers just couldn't cope and you were surrounded by people who all said "you was", then you may not even realize that this is incorrect grammar. Some rappers and comedians deliberately speak like that to appeal to a certain segment of their audience and quite notably, Sir Alan Sugar always says "you was" because he was a self-made billionaire who started working at a very young age instead of learning how to conjugate English verbs. But if someone said "you was"in an interview with me, my first reaction would be, "I'm not letting someone who speaks like that in front of our clients, it would give a bad impression". I've had white people whom I have rejected on that basis - it wasn't racism, it was just their inability to conjugate verbs in English. I was, you were, he was, she was, they were, we were: now, how difficult is that? 

So if it is really that straight forward, then why isn't this aspect covered by the education system then? Surely there can be a supplementary course to teach the kids from working class backgrounds how to behave in polite company, how to change their accents to sound more posh and dress the right way so they would fit right in when they show up at an investment bank for a job interview. Why are we sending them the message that all they need to do is to score well in their exams and somehow they will be richly rewarded in the working world? Why is the education system almost completely ignoring the need for soft skills then? Well, I have two theories: the first one is that working class people are oblivious as to what needs to be done - the were brought up to respect and obey their parents, then for them to be told, "you can't talk like your parents, dress like them or behave like them if you want a good job in banking", that's too much of a mind fuck for some of them as it comes across as disrespectful; so this conveniently falls into their blind spot and they never contemplate the issue. The other issue is that there really aren't too many good jobs out there, we're talking about extremely highly paid jobs whilst there are plenty of lowly paid, shitty jobs out there. So those in the position of privilege want to keep the good jobs for people who are of a similar social class whilst keeping the poor, working class people far away from these good jobs - hence there has developed this rigid social class system in the UK where I can tell a person's social class from simply looking at the way he dresses and even on the phone, even before he finishes his first sentence, I can already tell which social class he belongs to and whether or not I want to engage someone like that.

B) If I can do this, then why can't you? What's your problem?

Like I have said so many times before, I have every odd set against me as a child in Singapore. I came from a working class family: I am autistic and my parents are severely autistic. My father doesn't even speak English and more to the point, I had nobody in my life to teach me about the social class system - I had to figure it out all by myself. If this made me sounds very arrogant and like a total douchebag, then yeah I'm deliberately being provocative here. I don't think I'm that exceptionally gifted or intelligent, no - so if I am able to achieve all this, then there must be plenty of other black and Asian people who should be able to do a lot more than me, but why aren't they working in the financial services sector then? Well, I actually have a theory based on my experience in gymnastics. I remember back in 1990, I started training the Tsukhara vault - now, it may come across as a fairly standard skill for most decent gymnasts these days, but back in the day, nobody in my school trained that vault. Two of the older gymnasts in the school competed a handspring full twist and that was already considered quite difficult by our (rather low) standards. The Tsukhara was considered a risky and dangerous vault. When I started learning the Tsukhara, my efforts were met with scorn and mockery for a simply reason: nobody in the school had done it before, what makes me think that I would be the first person in the school to show up at a competition, compete a Tsukhara and actually land on my feet? Well, fast forward to 1992, not only did I land on my feet, I landed on a gold medal as well for the vault finals. Here's a video below from 2010 of me still performing the vault.

Were there other more talented gymnasts on my team? Of course there were, I was the most hardworking gymnast but definitely not the most talented one. So why didn't any of them try to learn the Tsukhara vault then? Well, they looked around the gym and didn't see anyone trying to learn such a difficult skill, so they immediately assumed that it would be too difficult for them and out of reach. Hypothetically speaking, if they had trained that vault with me, would they have become better than me? Of course they would have, but the fact is, they didn't. They all decided to train much simpler vaults - they were gambling on the fact that I was going to take a big risk by competing a much more complex vault and things are far more likely to go wrong with the more complex vaults. And of course, I had nothing to gain by persuading them to try to learn a more difficult vault like me, my strategy was to beat the rest of the field by competing a far more difficult vault. Fast forward a generation, the gymnasts in Singapore today are competing far more difficult vaults these days and you can't show up at a competition with a simple vault, hoping for everyone else to make mistakes - no, the strategy is to master a very difficult vault to the point where you can perform it very well at a competition. The bar has been raised considerably since the 1990s and I hope there's a young gymnast somewhere in Singapore today trying to learn a much more difficult vault than all his/her peers - you will never become a champion by waiting for others to fail.

Turning back to the world of banking then, it is of course possible that both women and young people of ethnic minority to do exactly what my team mates have done - they looked around the world of banking in London and thought, "there are so few women here and even fewer people of ethnic minority, why would I even bother trying?" Well, that's exactly what my team mates thought when I started learning my Tsukhara vault - nobody else on the team is doing that vault, why are you even bothering? I find this attitude really sickening - after all, I learnt the Tsukhara vault because I wanted to do it and I knew I could do it. I didn't do it because someone else asked me to do it or because everyone else was already learning it. No, it was based entirely on what I wanted to do. Likewise, I didn't look up to some role model in the world of banking and wanted to follow in his footsteps - that's just so bloody stupid. I have to make my own way in the world, I need to experience my own journey, I need to learn my own lessons and solve my own problems. My confidence in my ability to succeed should be based on what I know about myself, rather than what someone else has done - after all, what does the latter got to do with my abilities? I think a lot of people find excuses for not even trying and that's why I do feel quite justified in being quite arrogant sometimes and saying, "If I can do this, then why can't you? What's your problem? What's your excuse?" Because in this case, people are holding themselves back rather than being held back by others.

In any case, at that dinner I attended, I was seated between a Romanian banker and a white South African marketing consultant. Sure they both appeared as white and European as they come, but they are both immigrants who have spent far less time in the UK compared to me - neither spoke English as a first language (the South African guy spoke Afrikaans with his parents). Yet somehow, I was the one with the British passport and far more connections in this country - I may visually stand out as the non-white ethnic minority person, but the Romanian and the South African guys are just as much, if not more of an outsider than I am in the British banking sector. They too face the same obstacles in trying to adapt to a new culture, a new language and a very rigid class system. Likewise, I am autistic, that's not something you can see - what about the white men who are autistic, that's a form of disability which makes it harder for them to access good jobs. So why are we so focused on the differences that we can see, such as skin colour and gender whilst conveniently ignoring other ways that can render someone who is a white man just as much as a minority in the banking industry? Is it because most of us lack the imagination to try to go beyond what we can see with our eyes? In any case, because the Romanian and South African are perceived to be part of the dominant straight, white male cohort, nobody is going to think about doing them any special favours in the name of diversity, so actually they face even more challenges than I do but guess what? These two guys just get on with their careers rather than waste time complaining.

C) Laissez-faire: maybe things are fine the way they are? 

In this option, we accept the status quo as it is at face value. Should we spend so much time and effort trying to make sure that every single profession is hiring their fair share of women and ethnic minorities? Or do we just allow people to do what they want and pick the profession that they like? In most cases, people will naturally gravitate towards a career that they like and are good at because of their personality traits. So for example, it is a stereotype that in general, women would be better at jobs working with young children, such as being a kindergarten teacher as they have a maternal instinct. Is it therefore sexist of me to talking about the maternal instinct in the first place, is this based on a sexist assumption that women want to become mothers and perform their role as the caregiver and somehow men just don't feel the same way? Imagine if we set some kind of arbitrary rule that all kindergartens must have an equal male to female ratio at work because some equality minister wanted to make a point about making men do the jobs that women traditionally performed: such a rule would arbitrarily force some perfectly good female teachers out of a job only for some less suitable men to take their place. Whilst you have artificially created a more 'equal' workplace from the gender perspective, such a disruptive practice would be highly damaging to the quality of the education for the students involved. Often things are the way they are for a reason and trying to fix things may not improve them, but only make them worse.

Let's look at the case study of Zimbabwe. Until 2000, this was one of the most successful economies in Africa with a hugely successful agriculture sector that was run almost entirely by the white minority. This was controversial of course as that meant that the land was owned by the whites and they were still a lot richer than the black majority. In 2000, president Mugabe started his radical land reforms, seizing the farms from the white farmers and redistributing them to the blacks - the farms were badly mismanaged after they were given to people who had little or no experience farming. The widespread corruption lead to political instability and the Zimbabwean economy crashed, leading to a hyperinflation of 500 billion % in 2009 and widespread unemployment. Zimbabwe had gone from being the success story of Africa to one of the world's poorest countries in a few short years - all because the president thought it would be 'fair' to redistribute the fertile farmland from the whites to the blacks. South Africa has seen what happened in Zimbabwe and has accepted that nobody wants to see Zimbabwean-style economic meltdown in South Africa, so it is necessary to keep the whites exactly where they are in the positions of power whilst making more gradual, less drastic steps to empower the black population. If only Zimbabwe had just accepted the status quo of allowing the white minority to run the lucrative commercial farming sector, they could have avoided much self-inflicted misery and suffering. Having a white minority hold the majority of the wealth in Zimbabwe was a far from perfect situation, but the alternative of a total economic meltdown is so much worse.

The fact is most banks would hire the best students from the very top universities, so we have to follow the paper trail back to the universities and see what kind of students are being granted places at universities like Oxford and Cambridge. And indeed, whilst we don't see a gender imbalance at these top universities, we do see a strange pattern emerging here: whilst there are very few black students at these universities, there are plenty of smart Asian kids gaining places at Oxford, a staggering 15.9% of the student cohort there are Asian. So if we were to go from that figure and say, if the banks like hiring Oxford graduates, then about 15.9% of the people in that room should be Asian, right? So why were there only four Asian people in that room and rather than between one to two Asian people at each table? Why is the room overwhelmingly white then? But here's the thing: where are these bright Asian graduates? Are they unemployed or working in Chinatown for Asian businesses? Hell no, they are doing very well for themselves in other industries - just not banking. Let's face it, if you have a degree from Oxford, you can pretty much choose to work for any company you like and these bright Asian graduates have (for their own reasons) have mostly chosen not to go down the banking route and have decided to pursue other career paths instead. And so? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that - they did have the choice, they chose not to go into banking and does that constitute a problem? I don't think so.

Those of you who have studied economics would know the French phrase "laissez-faire" (pronounced "lay-say fair")  - this term describes a economic system free from government intervention and regulation, where private individuals are allowed to conduct their own transactions as they wish. It allows market forces to determine the outcome of these business transactions and in the world of banking, the recruitment process is very meritocratic - this is as close to laissez-faire as it gets: when there's an opening, the companies would go advertise the position and then create a shortlist of applicants they are interested in interview amongst all who applied. The companies then go through a selection process to try to select the best and most suitable candidate(s) for the job and this process is pretty much laissez-faire as it is important to allow each company to decide which candidate is best for the job. If the government were to start meddling with the process, by making it compulsory for a company to hire people on the basis of gender, religion, ethnicity, social class rather than simply on their ability to do their job - that would then distort the process and you'll end up in a situation where the companies are forced to hire the wrong people for the job. Now clearly, the companies have an incentive to hire the best people for the job because if you hire someone who's going to be shit at his job, you're going to lose money. Thus market forces will ensure that this process is run on the basis of meritocracy and really, you can't get more fair than that. So if it is fairness you're concerned about, then laissez-faire is as fair as it gets.

You know the saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? (Yes ironically, I know that sounds like broken English but it is such a commonly used phrase.) We currently have a system that has delivered one of the world's top financial centers - London is still the place to be if you are looking for a good job i banking and whilst the system has tended to favour a certain kind of older white man from a posh, upper class background, this inequality hasn't stopped the system from delivering great economic success. The question one has to ask is if increasing diversity in the work place by employing more women and ethnic minorities would lead to better results in such a competitive environment? Would such a measure lead to better results? This is a completely hypothetical question of course because it all depends: say you decide to have a quota for women and ethnic minorities as a HR policy - it would only lead to better results if and only if the people whom you do hire under this quota system are as good or better than their white male counterparts. If you can have both quality and diversity by attracting more top quality women and ethnic minorities to join your company, then great - that would be an ideal outcome But if you have to choose between diversity and quality, then a profit-making company in financial services would always have to choose quality. After all, you are dealing with the epitome of capitalism here: banking.

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? How would you react to the lack of diversity in the banking sector in London? Which of the three options do you most agree with? I actually spoke to a friend yesterday who works in banking and she said, "maybe many intelligent women look at the world of banking and think, it's full of wankers with big egos and it is not an environment I would be comfortable in, then they go work elsewhere and achieve great wealth and success in another field. I'm certainly not fond of the people I work with but I do it for the money - it is a harsh working environment and it isn't for everybody, people have the right to decide whether or not they want to enter this field. Women have the right to choose and this is their choice." By that token, she is actually agreeing with option C "laissez faire" and that rather surprised me, as she is a woman. Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.