Corporate diversity is a menace to equality

The politics of diversity is taking a turn for the absurd. This week, one of the world’s largest investment firms was forced to publicly deny that it had told managers not to hire white men.

The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that, as part of a new diversity policy, staff at State Street Global Advisors would have to get special permission to hire white males. On Monday a company spokesman dismissed this report as ‘factually incorrect’. But he did confirm that executives’ bonuses will be dependent on them hiring more diverse staff and they will be obliged to interview ethnic-minority candidates for vacant positions. Interview panels will also have to feature at least one woman, and ideally someone from an ethnic-minority background.

State Street is not banning whitey, then. But the fact that its approach to recruitment could have even been misinterpreted in this way shows how bizarre corporate diversity policies have now become.

Moreover, these policies now seem to lie at the very heart of corporate recruitment. State Street’s diversity chief for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Jess McNicholas, said that diversity was now ‘on every senior executive’s scorecard’. ‘All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and [increase] the number of colleagues from ethnic-minority backgrounds’, she said.

As is so often the case, diversity here does not appear to extend to class. State Street’s new policy could easily lead to a capable white working-class candidate being rejected in favour of someone from a far more privileged background who just so happens to be black. This kind of diversity is literally only skin-deep.

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Read also: ‘It’s okay to be white’ and the madness of identity politics by Charlie Peters, spiked

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