Women of colour: the double whammy
If you’re black or Asian and a woman, what are your chances of progressing in the world of work? Is the UK as fair as it likes to think?
At the last census in 1991 around 5% of women described themselves as being from an ethnic minority background – ten years on the figure is bound to be much higher. Historically, equal opportunities strategies have focused on race or gender as single issues, often missing the complexity of discrimination that can affect ethnic minority women at work.
The Race Relations (Amendment) Act came into force in April 2000. Its aim is to transform the public sector into a model equal opportunities employer, which is a far cry from its current state. The Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC), which recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Act, admits that equality between the sexes continues to be an uphill struggle – and bottom of the statistics pile in British society are ethnic minority women.
‘I think being black in a white country is hard, being a black woman in a white country is harder still. You get sexism coming at you from men, it doesn’t matter what their colour is, and then you’ve got racism from the whites. I wouldn’t want to change being black or a woman, what I would want to change is the ignorance among some whites and men at large,’ says administrator, Sarah Pascal, 28.
Good beginnings
In the 1960s over 200,000 West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis arrived in Britain to meet the skill shortages that the country was experiencing. Many came in the hope of a brighter future, to develop their careers and gain an education. EOC statistics are therefore disheartening. In spring 2000, the unemployment rate for women from ethnic minorities was about 12% (rising to 24% for Bangladeshi and Pakistani women) compared to about 5% for white women. These vast differences are due to several different factors, some of them cultural. But the experiences of black and Asian women provide some insight.
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