h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been completing a box ticking exercise so our company can be considered for work, and one set of boxes wants to know the percentage of our employees who are black, Asian & minority ethnic, what percentage are disabled, and what percentage are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Now ethnicity I can answer without going up to each employee and asking. Disabled ditto (if there's no visible disability I will assume there is no disability unless told otherwise which I think is fair enough).

But LGBT? Surely I'm not even allowed to ask the question? So does anyone know - can I?

Not that I'm going to ask, but I'm just curious. It seems like a ludicrous question to me.

Deb

A good question. I don't know if you can ask directly, but you can try and hold an anonymous survey and see if anyone replies.

The trouble with anonymous surveys is that they're fairly meaningless. I work in a University and all applicants who apply have to fill in an online stats survey. However at least 20% or so of students claim to be Bisexual Buddhists with serious criminal convictions who have changed gender since birth, have AD(H)D and attended any other UK educational institution where they gained a highest qualification of A Levels and would prefer not to say what their parent's occupation is and are confirming that they have a serious criminal conviction.

Either our university is the place where everyone in the UK who genuinely is a Bisexual Buddhist etc flocks to. Or possibly more likely, when the students have been asked to complete the compulsory government survey that asks questions on age, sex, religion, sexuality, educational background etc, they have got bored after completing 'Age', 'Ethnic Origin' and 'Sex' and then selected the top options on all the other questions' drop down lists.

<BB<

It is an interesting point, and something that has been debated a lot over the last few years.

In my organisation, they have two avenues for determining the profile of staff. One is that they ask people to include their details on application forms, staff records etc (with caveats that it is confidential data that is only accessed in accordance with strict data protection protocols for anonymous analysis purposes only) and the other is in anonymous staff surveys.

People are more likely to disclose anonymously rather than when the data is potentially linked to their name, so the proportion of people who declare themselves to be eg disabled is over 10%, whereas in the staff records it is less than 5%.

However, gender identity and orientation questions are not compulsory to be asked like the other questions are, so a good proportion of people don't fill them in even on the surveys, so the data that is gathered can't really be used for analysis yet, although it gives a flavour of whether people feel comfortable with the culture of the organisation if people are willing or not to disclose.

Gender identity and orientation may be less visible characteristics, but you can't even assume ethnicity or disability (an example of that that I encountered was when someone A sat next to someone else B at a diversity meeting and pontificated about how there were no people of such and such ethnicity in the organisation, and B said, "Actually I am that ethnicity!")

I fill in all the questions because I want to be counted, so the organisation can't say "we don't have any of *them* here", but I can understand people who don't want to disclose such details.

A prison record seems like the sort of thing that people would hide if they could, isn't it? As for disability, someone on crutches or in a wheelchair would have the sense not to deny hat everyone else can see. But if the hiring laws seem to favor hiring the disabled, might applicants exaggerate if they can get away with it?

If you're in your twenties or thirties, and you haven' figured out your sexual orientation yet, why would anyone expect you to declare your dilemma? If you're over 50, would your orientation make much difference one way or the other?

It's a diversity trip. All you have to do is cite data protection as a reason for not responding in detail or state that 20% of your workforce self-identify as fruit trees.

fruit trees?



They declare that on their apple-ications?

Actually, I can believe that 20% of our organisation are fruit trees

I realised I could write actual words in the space on the e-form reserved for the percentages, so I put "don't know" against sexuality. As it was a potential customer form it seemed politer than "It's none of your damn business and come to that, it's none of mine either!".

Deb

I think I would have put "irrelevant" - or maybe even "n/a"

I think my orientation is none of their business, though no one has ever asked for it on any kind of form.

"As for disability, someone on crutches or in a wheelchair would have the sense not to deny hat everyone else can see. But if the hiring laws seem to favor hiring the disabled, might applicants exaggerate if they can get away with it?"

Yes, I'm visibly disabled, so I may as well declare it on forms. I have always ticked the box to be considered under the "Two Ticks" scheme, which guarantees disabled people an interview if they meet the minimum requirements for a job, and I know it is true that more applicants declare a disability than people who already have jobs do. However, the declaration rate at application (for my company anyway) is still lower than the official proportion of disabled people in the working age population. Therefore, it is still likely that a lower proportion of disabled people are successful at interview (as a guaranteed interview is not a guaranteed job) and it doesn't seem to be seen as an advantage to exaggerate in that way.

People over 50 may have a need to declare something to ensure their partner can take advantage of partner benefits, for example. However, I do agree that "Other" and "Prefer not to say" are options that should be included in a survey.

I can't think of a good exemplum now, as the things I can think of are extreme, whereas my experience of such things is more subtle, but say if a company assumed all their employees had wives, then anyone who didn't have a wife would be more likely to be unhappy, wondering if their husband counted, or whether their not having any partner meant they couldn't join in with whatever activity, whereas the people with wives would just do the activity no problem. For myself, I just did feel unhappy at work when a colleague didn't listen to me because they assumed I wasn't a member of the group being discussed...

I saw an amusing cartoon about three workers who were at odds with each other.

"I don't get enough respect because I'm a woman" the woman is thinking.

"I don't get enough respect because I'm gay" one of the men is thinking.

"I don't get enough respect because I'm young," the other man is thinking.




Although it's meant in jest, I think there might be a serious side to this situation: supervisors who lack people skills.

That is something that I worry about, being "oversensitive", but there are two different scenarios that I've experienced.

One scenario is where someone says eg "People with characteristic X don't experience any disadvantage in the workplace", and I say "No, they might experience disadvantage if..." and they say "how would you know? you're not X". That made me unhappy, because they had stated they weren't X and assumed I wasn't X so they ignored my perspective even though their perspective wouldn't be any better.

The other scenario is there are two people and one job, and the person without characteristic Y gets it and the person with Y doesn't. The vibes say that the person with Y didn't get the job as it was assumed they wouldn't be as good at it because of Y, but nothing was said explicitly, so it wouldn't be likely to be proved in court and isn't worth getting too unhappy about overall.

I agree that communication and managerial people skills do help, so managers could be more thoughtful about the diversity of their teams and help to ensure that everyone has a voice about topics they have experience of.

Bingo!

If you have a team approach, the assumption is that everyone on the team has -- or could have -- something to contribute. There may be personality issues, but some managers seem to have been skills at surmounting them than others.

Management types have been studied for some time in Frederick the Great’s typology of officers these types were identified

The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts.
He has the nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions.

The cleverest and lazy man you make chief of staff.
He will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. You can use the brilliant but lazy man as a strategist.


The intelligent lazy men that are the most valuable. choose a lazy man To Do a Hard Job Because He will find an easy way To Do It.

An industrious stupid man is dangerous get rid of him, he makes work for others.

" choose a lazy man To Do a Hard Job Because He will find an easy way To Do It." [Bob Stafford]

I totally agree!

Industrious but stupid people are, unfortunately, persistent enough to get the reins of power and never relinquish them.

For perhaps 2 decades, our military (Canada) has conducted periodic anonymous surveys. Covering pretty much what you are looking for:

Do you self identify as lesbian, gay, female, aboriginal, francophone, Arabic, disabled, etc. It would have been much simpler if one of the first questions was "Are you an able-bodied Anglo caucasion male?" But they can't do that as it would be an obvious indication of the systemic discrimination.

Being under military auspices, of course the survey was not voluntary, so I can't guess at how truthful or viable the results ever were.

As for disability, I now fit in that category despite no impairments being visible. Congestive heart failure isn't as obvious as crippling due to child-hood polio.

As a straight, white man, when I get these types of questionnaire I tend to ignore them and return them incomplete. So in collected data, straight white men are likely to be under-represented. I don't feel oppressed in my workplace. I might do if I was a member of any minority.

I also have to collect that sort of data when I encounter service users.

And the stupid thing is if I am facing an obviously white man and he tells me that he identifies himself as a black African, THAT is how I am bound to record his ethnicity.

PP.

There are many people of decidedly mixed ancestry. Most famous are people like Lena Horne and the children of O J Simpson and Nicole brown Simpson. Senator Edmund Brooke's daughters were also of mixed ancestry. How they self-identify is their own business, in my opinion. I gather that it can years for them to process their identities. I wish them the best.

If the questionaire is supposed to represent an institution, a statement on institutional policy taken with remarks on the point that statistics of this sensitive nature are not collected ought to cover the question adequately.

Well they never came back & questioned my "don't know" response so hopefully that settled the matter

Deb