EWJ 60 April 2025 web - Journal - Page 88
Diversity Maths - Stubborn States
Stubborn States refers to the fact that it is far more difficult to change the constitution of a
substantial workforce by any quality such as a Protected Characteristic, (eg, race or gender) than
is generally realised. A good example of this is given by BT’s extreme example for their
Non-Openreach workforce to March 2025 – but even modest changes are far more difficult than
may be imagined. Let’s look at a simple model.
Say a large investment company has a staff of 30,000,
of which 30% are female, evenly distributed by age.
Let’s also assume that new entrants all start at age 21,
and everyone leaves at age 51 (the work is very stressful). Ignoring mortality, we would have 1,000 staff at
each age.
Because of the way the maths works, the answer is not
30/2 = 15 years, as you might expect, but about 8 ½
years – that’s because of something called gearing,
which I won’t go into here.
However, you now hit legal problems – it’s difficult to
claim your recruitment is meritocratic if you have
100% female recruitment – see the sections on the
“Curve of DEIth”.
https://diversitymaths.com/
the-curve-of-deith-what-it-tells-us/
The CEO decides to set a gender diversity target of
50% female staff, to roughly correspond with the UK
population. How should he go about achieving this?
The first thing to look at is the NET RECRUITMENTS for each year.
If you are recruiting from top graduates, my
assessment is that the average female recruit material
in this class would be 58%, and I don’t think you could
get away with more than 10% above this. Using 68%
female recruits gets you there in a bit under 16 years.
This is simply gross recruits less exits. We need to look
at this for both women and men.
The simpler one is exits. The total is 1,000, of which
300 are women and 700 are men.
No plan I have seen for changing the gender makeup
of a workforce is longer than ten years… and there’s
only one that long.
Let’s assume next year we recruit 500 women, and
500 men, according to the CEO’s assessment. The
new recruits are clearly 50% female.
Now, you may be thinking “That model is oversimplified – our firm isn’t like that”. Let’s see what arguments here might stand up – or not. There are four.
How close to 50% are we after one year? Not very far.
First – your recruitment may be at an older age than
21 – well, that won’t help you a lot, especially as then
the retirement age is likely to be a similar period later
(or they won’t earn a decent pension over their
working life).
Before, we had 9,000 women (30,000 x 30%), and
21,000 men.
Now we lost 300 women by retirement, and gained
500, so we now have
9,000 – 300 + 500 = 9,200.
Second – exits. “People leave, and are replaced”. OK.
If they are replaced by someone of the same age and
gender – no difference. However, the combination of
“not many leavers” (most firms are unhappy with
more than 10%), and the likely similarity of age and
gender of the replacement rather stymie that argument. Again, the Curve of DEIth effect stops an “all
women” replacement policy.
We also lost 700 men by retirement, and gained 500,
so we now have 21,000 – 700 + 500 = 20,800 men.
Total still 30,000. Percentage women = 9,200/30,000
= 30.667%
An increase of just 2/3 of 1%! But we need to change
by 20% (50% - 30%) to hit target.
So, as we change by 2% after three years, we need ten
times that to hit our target, ie
Third – “We are not static, but growing (or even
shrinking)”. If the latter, your recruits are likely to
come down – making targets even harder to reach.
But even if we have 20% annual growth in recruits –
quite a challenge – then the time taken to hit our target falls – but only from just under 16 years to just
under nine years (using the 68% female recruitment
model).
10x 2% = 20% - and 10 x three years = 30 years.
So to get to 50% women would take 30 years!
Try telling the Chief Exec that! (Especially as the
turnover rate for FTSE100 Chief Execs is about 30%!
He or she would want to be there to take credit for
the results!)
Fourth – the “Tie Breaker” argument. This says that
if two candidates are meritwise identical, you can pick
the black/gay/female one alone, based on that characteristic. That will only work very rarely, unless it’s a
small group. Imagine you are picking 100 recruits
As our exit rates are fixed, we can only change our
recruits. Let’s go all out, and recruit 100% women and
no men. How long would that take then?
EXPERT WITNESS JOURNAL
86
APRIL 2025
