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Notices and Press Releases

Fawcett : Response to DWP findings on ethnic minority women at work

Organisational 'cultures' the real barrier to ethnic minority women's success at work

Commenting on the DWP's findings that 'Public perceptions about ethnic minority women at work are out of touch with the times', zohra moosa, Senior Policy Officer of the Fawcett Society, said:

"These findings confirm what Fawcett's Seeing Double(1) project on ethnic minority women is discovering - that often the biggest barrier to ethnic minority women's success at work is other people's perceptions of them.

"Our research(2) has shown that the under-representation of ethnic minority women in senior positions is assumed to be a problem of supply. As a result, employers almost exclusively concentrate their efforts on training and mentoring already qualified women, mistakenly assuming that they don't have the skills or interest in climbing the ladder. While such support is obviously welcome, employers need to do more.

"In reality, the 'cultural barrier' that ethnic minority women face is not their own, it's that of organisations that maintain outdated stereotypes. Employers need to think about why they are not providing the demand for what the evidence shows is a highly ambitious, qualified and competent pool of talent."

Notes
(1) Seeing Double is a three year Fawcett project examining the experiences and needs of ethnic minority women in the UK. http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=375
(2) These findings came out of Seeing Double's recent roundtable series called Accessing Power