I can’t remember how many times in my career I have sat in meetings in which I am the only black woman or person of colour in the room. Yet without fail I’ve been surrounded by four Jamies or three Chrises, all of whom are, of course, white men. I have no grievance with these particular names, but I’ve noticed how they tend to be over-represented in every place I’ve worked, whereas finding a black woman is like trying to find a black girl on TV’s Love Island. And that’s what I have a problem with. Where are we? In those meetings I find myself thinking, again and again, ‘Why do I continue to be the only black girl in marketing in this office?’ As Yomi pointed out in the previous chapter, we are proportionately the largest group of graduates in the UK, but we remain the most unemployed.
It’s clear that Britain is a long way from being a level playing field of opportunity for all. Even after you’ve achieved the right grades in school, and you’ve gone above and beyond at extra-curricular activities, when it comes to the transition from education to employment something goes awry. In 2016 the Social Mobility Commission revealed that black and Asian children are less likely to get professional jobs, despite doing better than their white working-class counterparts at school.3
I always assumed that going above and beyond, and striving always to be exceptional, would be enough. I didn’t think I had the privilege of just being ‘okay’: mediocrity wouldn’t do. This resulted in an irrational fear of being left behind, the same fear that led me to try to get a job when I was 16, convinced that I was never going to get my GCSEs. You know the fear that wakes you up at 3am in the morning? You think it might just be pangs of hunger but it’s actually a fear of failure that intensifies when exams loom, or on the night before a job interview.
An unintended consequence of my ‘twice as good’ mindset has been that slowly but surely over the years I have turned into an insufferable go-getter. Even though I didn’t always have the right support in school, I knew I wanted to do well, so once I decided to commit to something, I was unstoppable, and I would always try to give myself a competitive edge in everything I did. So when most kids went to school only on weekdays, I attended Saturday school, too. When my friends had their lunch breaks, I assisted with the school’s fairtrade stall, and when I had my first internship I was the first to put myself forward for the position of chairwoman of the corporate social-responsibility committee.
It instilled a work ethic in me that meant I never wanted to take anything for granted. Friends from Warwick tell me they suffered from the same overachieving addiction: from volunteering to be playground prefects to taking Duke of Edinburgh Awards, to attending after-school debating clubs. By the time they were teenagers they had assembled an impressive roster of extra-curricular activities. It is now more apparent to me than ever that we didn’t just end up where we are out of luck: it is the result of a concerted effort over time. Some of us had challenges at school that we had to climb above, navigating the high expectations of our parents and sometimes the low expectations of our teachers.
ITV’s Charlene White became the first black woman to present News at Ten in 2016: a seat predominantly occupied by white men since the show’s inception in 1967. Despite, understandably, viewing it as a burden, the journalist and news anchorwoman credits having to work ‘twice as hard’ throughout her 20-year career in the industry as the reason she is where she is today.
‘Well, I was always raised – as I’m sure everybody else that you’ve spoken to has been – to work twice as hard as your neighbour. So at school I had to work twice as hard as the kid next to me, I had to do the same thing when I was at university, and I’ve done the same thing within my working life. I don’t know how to do any different, to be honest. So within my first few years of working, I did work placements from the age of 16 – not that anybody told me to do it. At 15, 16, I sent out 50 letters, because email wasn’t a thing then, 50 letters to try to get work experience. I got the Guardian newspaper, and that sort of changed everything, because as a result of being able to get in there for a summer, it then became that much easier to get work placements elsewhere. Then when I was working at the BBC, I was working across six different networks at the BBC, so Radio 1 and 1Xtra as a staff member, but then freelancing having my own show on BBC London. I was presenting the 60 seconds news on BBC Three and I was presenting the entertainment news on the BBC News channel. I was presenting bulletins on 5 Live, and I was presenting the early morning half-hour news before Wake Up to Money on 5 Live as well – I was just essentially working seven days a week with double and triple shifts.
‘I know for a fact that there’s absolutely no way in the world that I’d have got to where I am now, at this age, had I not done all of those things. And yes, there’ll be lots of people who haven’t had to do any of that stuff, at all, and yes, that does annoy me. I hope that when I have kids and they’re in the working environment, they don’t have to go over quite so many different hurdles. I had no one in my family who worked in telly. And when you’re working alongside people who, literally, it was their dad who insisted that their best mate give them a placement in a TV studio, and that’s how they ended up working in telly, and it’s like – do you know how hard I had to work in order to be able to get here? I didn’t have that luxury. And it’s also the understanding, and I don’t think people always understand it, so I actually sat down with a friend of mine and tried to explain it to him, because he was like, “Yes, but just because, you know, I had a parent who worked in telly, yes, that was an introduction, but I have worked really hard in my career in order to be able to get to where I am,” and I said, but what you don’t understand is how hard it is to just walk through the door of a newspaper, or of a TV studio, or a news studio, when you know no one. That is the hard bit. So when you’re able to do that, then I’m afraid we haven’t come from the same part, or same perspective, or the same situation in any shape or form.’
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A rose by any other name may leave you unemployed
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Some may not accept this ‘twice as good’ notion as fact, but the statistics speak for themselves. You’ve probably heard the following: men apply for a job when they meet only 60 per cent of the qualifications, but women only apply if they meet 100 per cent of them. As an ethnic minority, even when you do meet 100 per cent of the job description, you worry that it might not be enough and that you will still face discrimination. In 2012, an All-Party Parliamentary Groups report warned that ethnic minority women are discriminated against at ‘every stage’ of the recruitment process.4 The report revealed discrimination against names and accents, which made it much harder for ethnic minority women to get responses to applications. Interestingly, some found markedly better results when they changed their names to ‘disguise their ethnicity’.5 People with ‘white English’ names were 74 per cent more likely to get called for an interview following a job application than candidates with an ethnic minority name, despite the two candidates having exactly the same qualifications.6
During a speech in 2015, the then Prime Minister David Cameron appeared shocked by a practice that is a shrug-worthy reality for most minorities. ‘Do you know that in our country today,’ he gasped, ‘even if they have exactly the same qualifications, people with white-sounding names are nearly twice more likely to get call-backs for jobs than people with ethnic-sounding names?’ Well, yes. We do.
‘One young black girl had to change her name to Elizabeth before she got any calls to interviews. That, in twenty-first-century Britain, is disgraceful,’ he continued.
Disgraceful indeed. Surprising? Not in the slightest. The young black girl Cameron referred to wasn’t me, but it might as well have been. Trying twice as hard on my job applications is something I’ve become accustomed to. When I first graduated there was one particular marketing job at an ultra-posh investment management firm in Mayfair that I really wanted. Even though I was confident about my credentials and I felt I met the criteria, I knew it might not be enough. Before I clicked submit on my application I took one last look at their website. I went on the ‘management team’ section and saw a sea of white, mainly male