THOUGHT LEADERSHIP


QUOTAS:


HAVE WE HAD OUR SHARE?


Like the affirmative action laws in the US some fifty years ago, the proposed EU legislation enforcing a 40% quota of women on listed companies’ boards by 2020 is an example of policy aimed at correcting historic imbalances and enforcing diversity. Raphael Mokades, Managing Director of graduate diversity recruitment specialists Rare, argues that there is a time and place for such prescriptive action – and it isn’t here or now.


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In 2009, Nebraska voted for the ban, Colorado against. Most recently, white student Abigail Fisher filed a lawsuit against the University of Texas, reigniting the debate about the existence of these laws today.


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n the US, affirmative action laws were introduced in 1965 to address the systematic exclusion of minority


groups from employment and the public university admissions system. In recent times, however, these laws have come under greater scrutiny and an increasing number of legal challenges for being ‘unconstitutional’. In 2009, Nebraska voted for the ban, Colorado against. Most recently, white student Abigail Fisher filed a lawsuit against the University of Texas, reigniting the debate about the existence of these laws today. At Rare we do not use quotas – formal or informal –


and there are no backdoor routes. Our candidates go through precisely the same process as anyone else – same tests, norm groups, application forms and interviews. If they’re good enough they get an offer, and if they’re not, they don’t. We work with very high potential students and new


grads from diverse backgrounds to help them develop their potential and secure jobs in some of the world’s top companies, including Google, the Civil Service Fast Stream, Goldman Sachs and four of the five Magic Circle law firms. We work with each candidate on a one-to-one basis to find the best careers for them. So, is this the answer? Identify talented individuals


and help them develop, steering clear of quotas? Well, maybe. It works for our candidates – in the last two years for instance, our legal programme, Articles, has led to 40 candidates securing 50 vacation schemes between them. Many of these have been converted into training contracts. It seems to work over the longer term too – to date, 100% of the candidates Rare has placed have completed their legal training contracts and been kept on by their firms post qualification.


But would this work at board level, or is a quota more


appropriate? Does one size fit all, or is there a case for quotas in some areas, some of the time? My own view is this: as with most things, there’s a time and place – specifically, South Africa in 1994, the United States circa 1965, but not the UK now. I am receptive to arguments that quotas fundamentally


curtail individual freedom, and also that in certain circumstances true justice may require that temporal curtailment. The Black Economic Empowerment Rules in South Africa around 1994, clunky and prone to manipulation as they are, were a necessary step response to a system which had systematically created two classes of people. In this instance I believe that the overriding historical imperative was fast change and that quotas were right. This is not the situation in the UK today. Women


outperform men in the education system and, now, in entry to several professions. So, as a whole, do ethnic minorities. There are some specific ethnic minority groups – Black Caribbeans, for example – who underperform, but the degree of underperformance is not so great and the oppression not so recent that, in my view, the imposition of a quota is justified. And you have to look at the detail: black educational performance is improving more quickly than performance in any other ethnic group so it’s not a hopeless case – and things are moving. And the same is true of boards: the proportion of women on FTSE100 boards has increased from 10% in 2006 to almost 15% today. That is an increase of 50% in six years. That’s fast. The combination of publicity (and shame) and the business case, and the threat of regulation, seems to be moving the dial without the imposition of artificial measures. www.rarerecruitment.co.uk


GRADUATE RECRUITER 21


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