I’m every HR manager’s dream, a working class black woman – but I’d rather turn down a job than be the diversity hire
I’M every modern-day HR manager’s dream.
Black? Tick.
Woman? Tick.
Working-class background? Tick.
Throw in being young and an immigrant and I’m the undefeated diversity bingo Queen.
In this diversity-conscious, post-George Floyd world, it is clear to me what this means.
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By being a young, black woman, I am seen as the antidote to the pale, male and stale status quo that corporations and elite institutions are so desperately trying to rid themselves of.
On paper, this is great news for me and those who, by sheer accident of birth, happen to share the biological and ancestral characteristics that help you get by in the current pecking order of privilege (or lack thereof).
I should be revelling in it. However, my feelings are quite the contrary.
Diversity of thought is good, and of course, representation has many benefits.
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But as the adage goes, the dose makes the poison — and we are at risk of overdosing on diversity.
Dire performance
This week’s controversy over the academic Claudine Gay at Harvard University in the States has only served to solidify something in my mind: I will never say Yes to a job where I’m clearly the “diversity hire”.
Gay, the university’s first black president, has just resigned after accusations surfaced appearing to show she had plagiarised parts of her dissertation and other published research.
A review of the allegations by Harvard found some evidence of this, prompting Gay to request corrections to her work.
She initially came under the spotlight following a dire performance at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism, where she refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus would violate Harvard’s code of conduct.
Within days, her qualifications and suitability to head up one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions were being widely questioned.
Upon her resignation, writer Christopher Rufo, who has led the campaign against Gay, posted on X/Twitter: “Gay was not qualified, they made a bad decision in hiring her, and their commitment to race over merit has been a disaster.”
The thing about equality is that you have to take the good with the bad.
Rightly, women and minorities now have the right to access the jobs and university places that in the past were the reserve of wealthy white men.
But like their rich, white, male counterparts, they have now also earned the equal right to sometimes be shamelessly over-promoted, despite someone else being better for the job.
The West’s over-zealous attitude towards diversity at all costs is having many unintended consequences.
Firstly, it is inadvertently turning people like me into the poster girls and guys for diversity, against our will.
I don’t want to be the face of diversity in any company.
I fear there is a growing assumption that minorities and women are being put into roles purely for box-ticking, rather than on merit.
Just because this is the case for some, it doesn’t mean it’s the case for all of us.
A good friend of mine and I were discussing the foundation year at Oxford University, targeted at under-represented students and part of the “drive to diversify the undergraduate body”.
I was critical of it.
I find it condescending and counterproductive to lower academic standards under the guise of “helping” people, and make no apologies for that.
Looking slightly bewildered, my friend said: “But didn’t you get into Oxford on a diversity programme?”
At that moment, he did what few in life manage to do — offend me.
Here was a liberal-minded person who knew me very well and who considered me an intelligent, competent person capable of competing with him, a white male, on an equal footing.
I had given him no reason to doubt my abilities.
Yet here we were.
That’s when it first dawned on me.
If even he had assumed that my “diversity credentials” were responsible for my achievements, what about those who didn’t know me?
How many jobs, promotions and opportunities would I get in life where people would quietly think: “I bet her being a black woman played a big part in getting that”?
The thought horrifies me.
It is not the case that people feel this way because they are racists.
This growing feeling stems from the fact that too many institutions have made diversity a primary consideration in assessing people’s suitability for roles.
Unintended consequences
It is now undeniable that over-compensating with diversity is compromising fairness.
This is not just an opinion, it’s a legal reality. In June 2023 the Supreme Court in America outlawed affirmative action — the policy of discriminating by race in university admissions to boost diversity — when the group who brought the case successfully argued it undermined civil rights and equality.
In the same month here, the Royal Air Force was found by an inquiry to have unlawfully discriminated against white men in efforts to boost diversity, the largest organisation yet to be found to have done so.
No doubt, in the UK we will see more legal cases of this nature as more organisations tread dangerously close to the boundaries of our equality laws.
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We should accept that getting diversity wrong has unintended consequences, and we must do everything we can to curb excess in this area.
Not all of us “non-white”, “non-male” people want to be ticked boxes, tokens and diversity poster kids.