Race in the (European) Boardroom"
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
By Rana Foroohar Newsweek International
" Last month a team of Newsweek reporters set out in search of
ethnic minorities in the boardrooms of Europe, knowing full well we were
treading on delicate and uncharted ground. We had no idea how delicate.
Over the course of a two-week search, our team of eight contacted the
100 largest corporations in Europe, asking how many minority employees
had risen to their top ranks. Our assignment was to locate the glass
ceiling, to see just how high minorities have ascended in the corporate
world, and thus open a kind of window on racial progress. We got the
numbers we were looking for (chart), but we also provoked an outpouring
of anger and denial that was perhaps even more revealing. To our (mainly
American) eyes, this backlash suggested a European corporate culture far
more uptight and confused about race than it cares to admit.
Most European firms don’t track minority hiring figures at all, and
many others were confused or angered that anyone would even raise the
issue. "What a racist thing to ask!" fumed one executive at a
Frankfurt bank. A spokesperson for a German chemicals company scanned
his memory for a minority board member and recalled, "We had a
Belgian once." Struggling gamely to be responsive, a press officer
at a Swiss pharmaceuticals company noted that "Swiss are a minority
here," on a board stocked with members from England, Germany,
Austria and America. A white spokesman for a French telecom firm offered
himself up as "a useful case in point"part Hungarian, part
German, British-passport holder, living and working in France" His
company, he concluded, "is a pretty colorful place."
He was more helpful than many. In assimilationist France, where all
immigrants are expected to become unhyphenated French citizens,
executives tended to dismiss our queries as irrelevant or illegal under
French anti-discrimination laws. In Germany, many executives were
tongue-tied by both law and national history, uncomfortable discussing
race, much less counting employees by race. Our basic question seemed
straightforwardly statistical: how many minorities do you employ at the
following levels:"CEO, board member, top executive (president,
division head) or senior manager (as defined by the company)? We defined
minorities as people of non-European origin, a definition that would
include everyone from Asians or West Indians in Britain to Turks in
Germany. Of the top 100 companies in Europe, 69 either did not respond
to our survey or could not because they do not track issues of race in
the workplace. Even to raise the issue struck many as backward. "It’s
a question that doesn’t fit our times." snapped a press officer
from a German media giant.
With all due respect, these questions are timely, fitting and
impossible for Europe to duck much longer. The minority population in
Europe is nowhere near as large as in the United States, so Europe has
not yet been forced to confront issues of race in the workplace as
directly. But that will change. Immigration from Africa, Asia and the
Arab world is rising, yet corporate Europe remains far more of an
all-white clubhouse than corporate America, where big companies not only
track minority hires but often boast about them. In recent months,
African-Americans have risen to the CEO post at top corporations like
AOL Time Warner and American Express, inspiring a rethink of the state
of black leadership in America.
In Europe, we could not find one top company with a minority CEO, and
few with even one minority officer at any senior level. Europeans who
are offended by our questions may soon be forced to rethink, too. The
European Union will begin enforcing a new anti-discrimination law in
2003; that will have the effect of pressuring European companies to
track minority hiring more closely. The new EU law will also trump
national German and French laws that now discourage identifying
employees by race. The argument for counting is simple: if you don’t
know how many minorities you employ, you can’t begin to talk
definitively about race or racism in the workplace. "There’s a
pretend colorblindness in Europe today." says Dr. John Wrench of
the Danish Centre for Migration and Ethnic Studies. "When people
don’t count ethnic-minority participation in the workplace, it’s an
impediment to consciousness."
On a continent that likes to think of itself as more socially
progressive than America, many executives offer quick explanations for
the absence of minorities in high places. For one, minorities (including
white Hispanics) account for 31 percent of the U.S. population, but in
Europe, ethnic minorities represent anywhere from 6 percent of the
population in Britain to about 1 percent in countries such as Spain and
Italy. Moreover, most ethnic minorities in Europe are relatively recent
immigrants, and have not had generations to work their way up the
university and corporate ladder as, say, Africans have in America.
But such arguments fail to fully explain why minorities are so
disproportionately scarce in corporate offices. If minorities are not
ready for the corporate ladder in Europe, why are they often so
successful as entrepreneurs, especially in places like Britain? There,
minorities who make up 6 percent of the population are starting 9
percent of new businesses. Government statistics show that 18- to
24-year-old Asians and blacks are overrepresented in higher education,
yet are less likely than whites to find jobs directly after graduation.
Malek Boutih of France’s Association Against Racism recently conducted
a test by sending identical resumes, one with a French name and the
other with an Arab name, to a major bank. The French resume elicited an
invitation, the Arab a rejection.
These contradictions point to the deep ambivalence that still exists
about welcoming minorities in Europe. One of the few countries to
produce studies of race in corporate hiring is Britain, where there are
no legal obstacles to such studies. In February 2000, a Runnymede Trust
survey of the 100 largest companies in Britain found that minorities
(including Indians, other Asians and West Indians) represent only 1
percent of senior managers. The survey also showed that these minority
executives were far more eager to take assignments in the United States
than in continental Europe, citing fears of racial backlash, violence
and far-right party politics. Runnymede, a think tank, concluded that
"racial equality is not firmly on the business agenda."
The coming changes in European law are likely to jar the sense of
racial harmony. It was only last November that the French National
Assembly adopted a new law against discrimination in the workplace; it
forbids companies to identify workers on the basis of national origin,
sex or ethnicity. Many French companies cited that law in declining to
answer our survey, or in dismissing race as an issue. The comment from
the spokesman for a French telecom company was typical: "The notion
of ethnic minority does not exist in our Firm"
Immigration from Africa, Asia and the Arab world is rising, yet
corporate Europe remains far more of an all-white clubhouse than
corporate America, where big companies not only track minority hires but
often boast about them.
What is an African or Asian to think of that? Not surprisingly,
NEWSWEEK found very few minority executives who would publicly discuss
their experiences in the boardroom. Even at British Telecom, which is
one of the more progressive European companies and has a relatively high
number of top-ranking minority executives, none of those executives
wished to be interviewed. And surveys have found corporate leaders in
Europe deeply disconnected from the sense of exclusion widely felt by
their own minority employees. Yasmin Jetha of Abbey National bank is the
only Asian woman on the board of one of Britain’s 100 largest
companies, and she puts the issue gently: "Chicken tikka masala is
now the national dish of Britain, but the corporate world is a little
late in coming to realize this."
Europe will have to invent a new corporate jargon to deal with
increasingly unavoidable issues of race in the workplace, particularly
as immigrant populations grow. In Germany the old distinction between
Deutsch and Ausländer, or foreigner, hardly covers the increasingly
complex European ethnic reality. German bureaucrats have already come up
with a word to distinguish European Union members: EU-Inländer, or
"EU natives". But German companies still grope for the right
words to deal with nonwhites, for reasons that go well beyond the
discomfiting legacy of Nazi racial theory. Gertrude Krell, a diversity
expert at Potsdam University’s business school, points out that the
German word for personnel is das Personal "a noun without gender,
implying in German grammar not a human but a thing. "the word
programs us to think of something undifferentiated and homogenous, with
no room for individuals or diversity," she says. Her solution:
English. She’ pushing the phrase "diversity management" at
business seminars and conferences.
Mentoring, training and monitoring to promote minorities is a
burgeoning industry in the United States, but has been slow to take hold
in corporate Europe. Dr. Dwain Neil, who was head of recruitment and
diversity at a major European oil company in the mid-1990s, says that
hiring managers often rated minority and white candidates differently,
even for the same answers in job interviews. "we stopped using some
of those managers," says Neil, now a diversity consultant. "It
became clear to me that we had a blind spot."
Now the United States is starting to export diversity advocates and
trainers to Europe. The Chicago-based National Black MBA Association
recently opened a branch in London, where it runs networking sessions to
bring together minority recruits and blue-chip European firms. American
consultant Jerome Mack runs Equalities Associates in Britain, and
advises on "diversity turnaround projects for companies such as
Lloyds TSB, the British bank. Since a 1996 internal study found what one
executive calls "a real sense of isolation among Lloyds’ minority
employees, new diversity programs have increased the minority share of
the bank’s new graduate-school recruits from 2.5 percent to more than
20 percent.
That may be only a beginning. Practical arguments for diversity are
eroding the invisible barriers. As more European companies move into new
territories, they’re looking for managers who can open up local
markets. Derek Hudson, who helped land business for British Gas in his
native Trinidad before BG made him a vice president in Britain, says
there is obvious "synergy" between minority hiring and
business development.
On a continent facing future labor shortages, companies ignore
minority talent at their peril. Yet few have any real strategy for
recruiting minorities of any kind. Commerzbank has had a program to
promote women since the 1980s, and last year became the first major
company in Germany to appoint an ethnic Turk (Mehmet Dalman) to its
board. But not many have followed. "How can you talk about race in
the German boardroom when you can’t even find a German woman
there?" says Commerzbank spokesman Dennis Phillips.
New law will push Europeans to tabulate matters of race more
systematically. It’s already illegal to discriminate against
minorities in most European nations. But the EU directive that takes
effect in 2003 will shift the burden of proof in discrimination cases
from employees (where it rests under national laws) to employers. This
will pressure employers to keep records on minority hires, so they can
prove themselves innocent of discrimination if dragged into court. EU
employment spokesman Andrew Fielding says the law doesn’t require
better records, but that will be the practical result for businesses
that want to protect themselves.
Corporate views of race will also be shaped by the growing reach and
powers of the European Union itself. As the union expands its borders to
include Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and perhaps someday even Turks, it
will be increasingly difficult to exclude nonwhite minorities who are
not historically members of the European club. "When I say, "I
am a European," there are plenty of people who’ll look at me and
say, "No, you’re not, says Maureen Salmon, the executive director
of the British Black MBA Association. "I think that attitude plays
in a larger way to the debate around European unity"
It’s not possible to create a "colorblind" continent by
simply outlawing discussion of race. And bald facts"like the number
of ethnic minorities in high corporate places"are only a crude, if
necessary, beginning. Europe as a whole recognizes that now, even if
many of its largest corporations (no matter how well intentioned) do
not. To paraphrase Ben Okri, the African-born writer living in Britain,
nations become the stories they tell themselves, stunted by lies, or
flowering as truths. Until now many European companies have told
themselves that the glass ceiling doesn’t exist, a half truth at best.
As that story begins to change, corporate Europe has an opportunity to
flower.
With Stefan Theil in Berlin, Samia Marais in Paris, Tara Pepper in
London, Heike Wiedekind in Frankfurt, Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Emma
Daly in Madrid
|
