Race

The Scottish Government's Equality Evidence Finder cites a figure of 4.6% as being the proportion of the population who identify as Black Minority Ethnic people [BME] as at 2018.

In 2019, Equality Here, Now checked the performance of Universities in Scotland as employers in delivering employment equality for BME people. The conclusion of that research was :

The elimination of race discrimination, a pivotal part of the general equality duty, requires an explicit acknowledgement by all public sector bodies that institutional discrimination is alive and well and exists within and across the structures, policies and cultures which create each organisation as an individual legal entity and yet bind it irrevocably to wider society itself. No such acknowledgment has been made by any of Scotland’s universities in the employment data reports they published in 2019.

The level of employment of BME people in Scotland’s universities is obviously underpinned by recruitment from abroad. That being the case, any benchmarking of performance on BME employment equality cannot use, for example, Scotland’s BME population [4% at the 2011 census] as a key indicator. At the same time, no university has attempted to calculate what their workforce profile would look like were institutional discrimination eliminated. In the absence of this, Scotland’s universities cannot be held to account on race equality as employers.

WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] people have held the monopoly on positions of power and privilege within Scotland’s universities as employers for decades, if not centuries in some cases. Legislation in the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century aimed at eliminating race discrimination has failed to break the monopoly that WASPs hold. The requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and specific equality duties in Scotland have found universities locked into a sterile two-year cycle of gathering workforce data and publishing often inaccessible and ineffective workforce profile reports – while the baseline evidence they reluctantly disgorge tells us that nothing is changing. Evidence of race equality – or race discrimination - remains shrouded behind an opaque curtain of unexplored and disconnected silos of employment data on ethnicity and nationality.

There is a well-known quotation defining insanity [and often mis-attributed to Einstein] :

“doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”

Scotland’s most recent attempts in the 21st century at framing equality legislation and regulations to eliminate discrimination are insane.

Equality Here, Now has researched the performance of Universities in Scotland as an employer of BME people over a number of years, and the journey from then until now in terms of race equality at work can be uncovered in the research reports published in 2017, 2015, and 2013.