What next in the inclusion debate?

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For the past few years, the realisation that most of our workplaces are not representative of the population has started to firmly sink in. While straight, white men have thrived, the same cannot be said for almost everyone else.

Whether it’s a case of failing to appeal to, welcome, promote or nurture women and minorities – be that based on ethnicity, sexuality or disability – the problems have been broad. Some businesses and sectors are worse than others and it’s a complex issue without easy answers.

The momentum behind employment diversity has been building for some time. Equal pay was first enshrined in UK law in 1970 and the right for men and women to be paid the same when doing the same, or equivalent, work is now part of sex discrimination law in the Equality Act 2010. In addition, since April 2017, employers in Britain with more than 250 staff have been required to publish their gender pay gap data.

The latter has created something of a tipping point; while it hasn’t gained universal approval, it has meant there was finally some benchmark and form of measurement. But it’s only one element in a complex picture.

Within the market research sector, there’s a particularly compelling argument for greater diversity in our workplaces. Our job is to understand consumers and the public, to be curious and to gain insight into all corners of society to help brands, charities and the government. How can we do that if we are not representative?

The Market Research Society (MRS) has started several initiatives in recent years to investigate and address representation. This includes publishing the gender pay gap data for market research agencies; an annual inclusion report on the industry; launching the MRSPride network for LGBTQ+ members; establishing a working group on inclusion; and setting the challenge to agencies’ leaders to sign the CEO Pledge that consists of five commitments to make safer and more representative workplaces (see box).

However, more needs to be done. To this end, we organised a roundtable discussion chaired by Vanella Jackson, global CEO of Hall & Partners and leader of the MRS inclusion working group, to discuss how to move the conversation on, create more specific actions, and scrutinise existing policies and progress.

Kenny Imafidon, co-founder and managing director of ClearView Research, pointed to the problem of equity being missed out of the inclusion and diversity conversation. “Equity comes before equality, and we often talk about it interchangeably. There’s no point giving everybody the same level of resources when everybody starts at different places.

“It’s about co-creation. If you are six white people in a room writing strategies about how we get people from minorities, that’s just not going to work. A lot of it is bad from design. I’m a possibilist, not cynical, but you must get the right people in the room.”

And if the design is poor from the start, the people you are trying to empower will be instantly put off because they’ll be instantly disappointed, he added.

Babita Earle, executive vice-president, strategic partnerships, Zappi, argued that to implement a strategy it has to be established from the bottom up, as well as the top down.

Caroline Frankum, Kantar’s global CEO, profiles division, was particularly interested in overcoming the problems around hidden diversity. “Inclusion and diversity have focused too much on visual differences. If you just focus on the visual element of how diverse we are – what gender or colour we all are – we are going to fall into a trap,” she said.

Russ Wilson, partner at Hall & Partners, took on that point: “With hidden diversities and disabilities, they’re starting from even further back. There’s not that same awareness within wider culture; we have Pride, we have Black History Month, and they’re big cultural events. The equivalents for neurodiversity, for dyslexia, for autism, aren’t as present in people’s minds.”

Imafidon raised the problem of limited resources – who will pay to make this happen – and argued for the need to prioritise and compromise. “You have to be very tactical about whatever you’re going to take right now and go on that long journey. I agree with [Frankum’s] invisible and the visible point, but we haven’t even tackled the visible yet. And this one is right in front of us,” he said.

Jan Gooding, president of the MRS and chair of Stonewall, was previously global inclusion director at Aviva. In that role, she canvassed the opinions of people in other organisations that had made better progress building diverse teams.

“First, they said if we had our time again, we would not have prioritised gender. It’s the mistake everybody makes. It could have been BAME, sexual orientation, disability; just not gender. Because it makes out you have to fix the women, it annoys the men, it’s too narrow and it doesn’t lead to inclusion.

“Second, they said the only way to get the resources is to have a simple inclusion business case, where the outcome is a diverse population that is representative of the marketplace in which we operate.

“You would expect a business in London to be representative of the London population, which most are not. You can do it by country, or region, or whatever. You will have national statistics against which to benchmark your progress,” added Gooding.

To benchmark, you need figures to measure. “There are all sorts of reasons why people don’t disclose. The integrity of data collection, who’s asking, why, and what are you going to do about it, is a subject on its own,” said Gooding.

At Aviva, she picked five demographics based on nationally available data, so there was a benchmark in each market. The five were: age, disability, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. In the UK, the company also looked at social mobility.

Unsurprisingly, for an industry based on evidence, the roundtable discussion returned several times to this topic of finding tangible measures to monitor progress.

Imafidon said: “Everyone has to accept that this stuff will never be perfect. You want as much buy-in as possible, so, by the time you execute, you already have people there. If they know that it’s meaningful and has teeth, people will support it. There are a lot of people who care whether or not they directly identify with that group or not.”

Michael Brown, partner insight and cross-culture, UM and chair of MRSPride, pointed to the work the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) is doing on diversity. “If we truly want to make a step change in having more diverse entry-level talent, then look at the IPA’s Advertising Unlocked. It twins agencies with different schools from not very privileged circumstances, and brings them into the agency for a day so that they can understand what it’s like to work there, and then they will be prioritised for apprenticeships, for example.”

Recruitment channels are also a pressing issue as the industry needs to move beyond an intake purely based on Russell Group graduates. Several people at the roundtable also complained that the initial pipeline from recruitment agencies was rarely diverse.

“I’m trying to build a team, and I just don’t get diversity, or visible diversity in the CVs that come in. How do we get people coming into the funnel, so they feel this is a place that they can work? How do you change the attitudes and behaviours of HR teams and hiring managers?” said Hall & Partners’ Wilson.

What is preventing young diverse people from coming into this industry is precisely what Momo Amjad, strategic researcher at The Future Laboratory, has been researching.

She used a technique of training 18- to 20-year-olds to go back into their communities and interview 12- to 18-year-olds for the research.

“Everybody had all of these ideas, like kids just want to be YouTube stars and do these exciting other things. But we found that for young, BAME people – they’re still thinking about prestige careers, because they have a very realistic idea of what their life will look like.

“They don’t have the same opportunities. They can’t do an unpaid internship; they have to go into a career that will pay them well, because they’ll be caring for their parents and contributing to their family. They’re not going to move out at 18, to go to live in a flat with all of their friends and have a gap year,” said Amjad.

“Kids in schools don’t know about us. They have no idea that we exist, and you can’t be passionate about a career that’s stable, that will offer you opportunities, make you feel secure, if you don’t know about it.”

Amjad talked about her own experience: “I’m a first-generation immigrant, and I had a slight American-Pakistani accent. Everybody at school made fun of me so I watched the BBC for four years to get this accent. It has benefited me immensely in my career, because I’m able to code switch, I can participate in meetings with clients in a way that doesn’t make them feel afraid. I’m like the palatable person of colour,” she said.

Amjad’s challenge was that every time we say diversity, we are talking about assimilation. “What we really mean is including people to be part of a predominantly white class – able-bodied and privileged. We want people to assimilate into that group.”

These points absolutely resonated with Earle. “If they’re going to impersonate, why would they come to market research when they can be a solicitor, or a doctor, or a dentist? You know, our industry is just not understood. But if you break down exactly what your day involves, it’s cool,” she said.

To identify discrimination, Gooding said monitoring career progression also creates a good framework. “Discrimination means you don’t get on: you either don’t get recruited, don’t make the shortlist, don’t get the job, get the job but don’t get promoted. It’s quite helpful to think about career progression, because that’s where discrimination turns up.”

Returning to the importance of data, at Aviva, Gooding analysed ageism – “because people’s age is recorded”.

“We were astonished to discover that in a population of 17,000 workers, people over the age of 40 no longer got ratings as high performers; they had less-good bonuses and didn’t get pay rises. If you have data, it gives you something to make the case on. You can do the analysis to show the discrimination,” she said.

At an industry level, Gooding argued guidelines are needed to help businesses get started and know what to look for, or measure. “Pick something like age, because it is quite inclusive, everybody’s got one, and it’s not gender.”

And what about quotas? Always contentious, but with the potential to be measured.

“I think the fashionable way to say it is positive affirmation, and I’m a big fan of that,” said Amjad.

But Gooding was less enamoured, preferring targets: “You choose what the target is. So, rather than a quota, you’re constantly looking at the progress people are making.”

We also need to share good practice in the industry so we can gain collective insight and all learn from each other. “There’s a huge number of SMEs and we need some help. If there are organisations out there that are doing it well, how are they doing it? There are smaller businesses that are thinking, ‘OK, our founders are three white dudes who are trying to survive. We want to grow, we want to scale, but we want to do it sustainably, and in the right way. What are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about right now?’” said Earle.

This is very much a work in progress.

The MRS CEO Pledge asks companies to:

1. Publish pay statistics annually and demonstrate clear progress towards gender and BAME pay parity
2. Work towards ensuring all staff are fully representative of the UK’s diversity
3. Work towards achievement of government targets on inclusion of women and BAME people at executive and board level
4. Improve recruitment of a representative intake, ending unpaid internships and supporting school, university and apprenticeship programmes
5. Create safe places to work; commit to the timeTo code of conduct; a proactive culture that supports whistle-blowing; and train staff to create systems to support those who need help for stress or mental health issues.