Report: The Initiatives that are Actually Improving Business Diversity

Diversity and Inclusion are increasingly recognised as an important part of business across sectors and geographies. Boards and shareholders understand that diverse teams create products and services that better serve customer needs across segments, drive innovation and creativity, and deliver greater returns than competitors.

In the past decade, D&I has been championed as integral to business success and has received greater attention and investment than ever before. However, are D&I programmes really effective? And which initiatives are actually worth the investment?

We surveyed business leaders to find out. Download our free report to discover how the top CEOs, CTO and HRDs are improving diversity and inclusion.

The State of Diversity in 2021

2021 headlines revealed how far industries still need to reach to achieve equality in representation and opportunity:

• Only 8 of the UK's top 10 companies are led by women
• 2 in 3 non-white staff in the City and Canary Wharf currently face racism at work
• Bullying is driving LGBTQ+ people out of tech
• 90% of both hiring managers and candidates state they want increased diversity in the recruitment process.

Covid-19 served to further threaten the progress of D&I in business. Women and those of ethnic minority backgrounds were significantly more likely to lose their jobs and be made redundant after the furlough ended.

Although D&I representation varies across industries and sectors, minority voices in tech and IT are particularly:

• Only 19% of UK and 17% of European tech specialists are women.
• 40% of men studying STEM subjects but in a sexual minority (not straight) would leave the degree after four years: much higher than the 26% of straight men who would leave. 
• Only 9% of BAME IT specialists are at director level, despite 85% of BAME IT professionals having a related degree or higher qualification compared to 66% of white peers.
• 40% of LGBTQ IT professionals have experienced direct homophobic discrimination or harassment at work – rising to half for employees at tech companies Facebook, Oracle, LinkedIn and Netflix
• 74% of diverse professionals working in IT have experienced discrimination at work.

How Leading Businesses Are Finding Diverse Candidates

68% of business leaders report struggling to recruit diverse candidates.

Amongst diverse groups, race was reported as the group that most leaders were finding challenging, with 30% struggling to find candidates across different ethnic backgrounds. Age was reported as the second most challenging diversity group, with 22% of leaders struggling to recruit a wide enough range of age groups.

Download the free report to discover:

• The challenges of recruiting diverse candidates and building an inclusive culture – in the words of business leaders themselves
• Which industries are experiencing the greatest difficulties with diverse recruitment?
• What are businesses doing to improve diversity and inclusion – and which initiatives are succeeding?