Half of working professionals unsure what they can and can’t say anymore, with 40 per cent afraid to say ‘Black’ in relation to race and ethnicity according to new report

Fear of saying the wrong thing may be hindering the progress of diversity and inclusion in UK workplaces, as half (50 per cent) of working professionals say they are unsure what terms they can use without causing offence or saying something inappropriate.

Despite the prevalence of the Black Lives Matter conversation over the last 12 months, 40 per cent of working professionals are also still afraid to say the word ‘Black’ in relation to race and ethnicity in the workplace. Concern about using acceptable and inclusive language in the workplace extends beyond race and ethnicity too – many working professionals also avoid saying ‘gay’ (37 per cent), ‘lesbian’ (36 per cent) and ‘disabled’ (35 per cent).

These findings come from The Diversity & Confusion Report by The Unmistakables, an award-winning diversity and inclusion consultancy, which surveyed 1,522 UK workers between 16 to 19 March 2021. While the vast majority of those surveyed (88 per cent) agreed that the diversity and inclusion agenda is important, less than half (46 per cent) said they engage in it, which is perhaps driving workplace fear.

Not only are workers fearful of getting inclusive language wrong, many also worry about the consequences of making mistakes. One in six (15 per cent) working professionals fear they could lose their job if they get terms around race and ethnicity wrong, and nearly one in three (30 per cent) believe it would result in a formal disciplinary. Fear of repercussions might help explain why working professionals are now more confident talking about death (38 per cent) than race and ethnicity (29 per cent) in the workplace.

In order to avoid the risk of saying the wrong thing, many UK workers admit to deploying techniques to exclude themselves from inclusive conversations: 32 per cent have turned away to focus on something else when it came to conversations around gender, 28 per cent have pretended they weren’t listening to conversations around sexuality, and 16 per cent have said they had to go to a meeting when conversations about age have arisen in the workplace.

Ben Brooks-Dutton, Managing Partner of The Unmistakables, says, “Organisations really need to address the fear that is potentially preventing progress of both the D&I agenda and underrepresented communities in the workforce. The truth is there’s really no way of doing this without putting the work in. We often hear people saying how “ridiculous” it is that they “don’t know what to say anymore.” Is it really though? Don’t we go on IT training courses to learn about how to use new technologies? Are we not often required to learn about safety in the workplace? It’s time we challenged our thinking about inclusive language and acknowledged that just as societies and cultures evolve and shift, we must evolve and shift as working professionals too.”

Recent UK Government advice stipulated that the terms ‘BME’ and ‘BAME’ should no longer be used, evidencing just how rapidly language can evolve. In the controversial report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published in March 2021, the chair of the commission, Dr Tony Sewell, wrote, ‘Use of the term BAME, which is frequently used to group all ethnic minorities together, is no longer helpful. The BAME acronym disguises huge differences in outcomes between ethnic groups. This reductionist idea forces us to think that the principal cause of all disparities must be majority versus minority discrimination.’

The Diversity & Confusion Report indicates another emerging ‘reductionist idea’ that sees many different people grouped together: the use of the term ‘diverse’. The survey shows that almost one in five (19 per cent) working professionals are likely to misuse the ‘term’ diverse to avoid saying what they actually mean by stating specific characteristics. The same amount of people also misuse the collective term ‘diverse’ to signify an individual of a different social or ethnic background, gender, sexual orientation, religion or disability.

Asad Dhunna, CEO of The Unmistakables, adds, “I’ve been called ‘diverse’ so many times, and yet I’m not sure if I’m being called that because of my sexuality, my ethnicity or both. After crusading for the abolition of the word ‘BAME’, I’m tempted to do the same for the word ‘diverse’ purely because it says absolutely everything and nothing at all. The fact that a fifth of people say “diverse” when they actually mean something else is quite revealing and it shows up when businesses and people running them publicly say they want to be more ‘diverse’? It must always be qualified – diverse in what sense? Only by saying what you mean can you design and implement the structural change required rather than simply say, ‘We need more diversity’.”