According to data from a Home Office survey 11% of the Asian and White British working population are in ‘manager, director or senior official’ roles, compared to just 5% for the Black working population in 2018.
The data also shows that on average 47% of workers in the UK were in ‘senior management’ or ‘professional’ jobs, and 53% were in administrative or manual roles including admin, secretarial, sales and customer services, machine operatives, care, leisure, cleaning, etc.
But the proportion of Black people in administrative or manual roles (62% of the Black working population) is significantly higher when compared to White people (54%) and Asians (51%). The figure below shows a summary of the distribution of the working population by ethnic groups across ‘senior’ level, ‘professional & mid’ level and ‘Admin & manual’ roles.
Before we can even begin to address the situation, further work is needed to better understand what factors impact on these outcomes. For example:
- Education and qualification. Whether certain ethnic groups are better (or otherwise) at pursuing and earning qualifications that are more likely to lead to senior management or professional roles.
- Recruitment and selection processes. The levels of systemic inequalities in the selection process that works for, or against, certain ethnic groups.
- Attainment levels. Are certain ethnic groups better at achieving, or otherwise, the results required to progress into senior management or professional roles?
- Career progression. The structural forms of privilege and bias that enable certain ethnic groups to progress into senior management or professional roles at a higher rate than others.