Homepage > Themes > Ethnicity and Race

Ethnicity and Race

In several European countries there is a serious concern about the position of ethnic minority groups in society and in the workforce. Unemployment in ethnic minority groups is often high by comparison to with other groups even when taking into account the possible effects of different levels of education. The high unemployment rate for ethnic minorities is caused by several factors. One is the reluctance of many employers to hire workers from these groups. Another reason is that many organisations do not know what to do in order to attract and retain workers from ethnic minority groups. Finally, many people in ethnic minority groups have a ‘larger distance to the labour market': they do not have the right education, do not master the local language, or they can not function well in the organisational culture that is common in the country they now live in.

In this section, we describe the specific position of ethnic minority workers in organisations, and present suggestions for a modern HR-policy that takes into account this specific position.

Ethnic and Cultural Groups: Definitions

When talking about ethnic minority groups several definitions are used. One type of definition is based on the country of origin: the person or at least one of the parents is born abroad in one of the developing regions of the world: Asia (except Japan), Africa, etc. This definition does not include groups like travellers nor does it include latter generations of migrant groups. Other definitions do include these groups. They focus on historical ties: a group of persons is seen as an ethnic group when they share (or believe to share) a common history, that is passed over from one generation to the next. They are seen as an ethnic minority not so much when the group is small, but when the group has little influence because of its juridical or socio-economic position. A small, rich group does therefore not qualify as an ethnic minority group. National or organisational policies on ethnic or cultural backgrounds are usually limited to ethnic minority groups and leave out the other more influential ethnic groups.

For an overview of the different ethnic minority groups in Europe go to the 'demographics' section on this Website.

Ethnic Minorities and Work: What's the Problem?

Bluntly, the problem with ethnic minorities and work is that a disproportionate part of the ethnic minority population does not have work. There are several reasons for this. On the one side, the general level of education is usually lower for ethnic minority groups, and in many cases individuals belonging to these group have difficulties with the dominant language in the country. Also, many employers do not give people with an ethnic minority background the chance to prove themselves. They simply do not hire applicants with an ethnic minority background. This discriminatory behaviour of employers is not always conscious; often they result from prejudiced ideas about different groups, prejudices that are so entwined in society that we are not even aware of them. Still, their effect is strong.

The Influence of Expectations

Judgements of employers are strongly influenced by what they expect from them, and these expectations are strongly influenced by our perception of the group the other belongs to. Simply speaking: we tend to see positive behaviour of a person from our own group as stable and normal, negative behaviour of the same person is often seen as an incident, caused by an external factor. When the other person does not belong to our in-group, e.g. he is from a different school, positive behaviour is seen as an incident and negative behaviour as normal and stable. This way of reasoning makes it easier to have a positive image of ourselves and the people near to us, and we are, again often unconscious, highly motivated to keep this image. Information that does not fit in this image is thus overlooked, fitting information overestimated.

Positive Behaviour

• Own group: Stable, normal (that is how we are)
• Other group: External cause, incident (they were helped)

Negative Behaviour

• Own group: External cause, incident (they had bad luck, they were hindered)
• Other group: Stable, normal (that is how they are)

Expectations Become a Self-fulfilling Prophecy

In order to find out why black applicants so often failed to be hired, Word, Zanna and Cooper observed interviews with black and white job applicants. They noticed that the interviews with black applicants were shorter, the questions were posed in a different way, and, in short, the non-verbal behaviour of the interviewers was different than when interviewing a white applicant. Also, the black applicants were more often rejected for the job.

One could conclude that the black applicants were just not as good as the white ones. The researchers doubted this conclusion, and started an experiment. They trained interviewers in either the behaviour that was earlier shown to black applicants or the behaviour that was shown to white applicants. They then had the interviewers interview both white and black applicants. The result: both black and white applicants that were interviewed as if they were black, did less well than black and white applicants that were interviewed as if they were white.

The conclusion: the (mostly unconscious) expectations about black or white applicants influence the behaviour of the interviewer. This behaviour in turn influences the performance of the applicant: the expectations work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why Make an Effort?

There are several reasons why the high unemployment of ethnic minorities is undesirable. For organisations, it means that they overlook a large group of potential organisation members, a group that almost certainly contains very good candidates. Since in most European countries the number of young people entering the labour market is decreasing, it becomes more and more important to ‘catch' the ones who do!

On a societal level, a high unemployment of ethnic minority members can result in frustrations and social tensions. These tension have a negative effect on the position of many organisations, directly (violence, demolition) or indirectly. So, making sure people of an ethnic minority background get a fair chance is in the best interest of organisations!

How to Make HR Work for Ethnic Diversity

There are many things that employers who that want to give ethnic minority members a fair chance can do. A first step is screening the HR-policy of the organisation. In many organisations, this policy excludes people of ethnic minority background, or at least puts them in an unfavourable position. In most cases this was never the intention. The policy was designed for the existing, white, population of the organisation and never adjusted to the increasing diversity. Many organisations are embarrassed at this finding. In this section we describe some options for making your HR-policy more diversity-sensitive.

Recruitment and Hiring

How organisations recruit is often a matter of tradition: over the years a routine has developed. This routine worked well to reach the existing workforce, but in order to reach a different target group, e.g. ethnic minority persons, a new strategy must be developed.

Questions that may help in screening the recruitment and hiring procedure:

• Are advertisements placed at places where the groups will look for jobs?
• Does the description of the function leave room for people who are a bit different to 'fit in'?
• Are the qualities of people with a curriculum that differs from what we are used to recognised?
• Are the selection tests culturally neutral?
• How do we look at people with a different cultural background or a different (darker) skin-colour?

Though most organisations feel that they do relatively well, research shows a different pattern. Most of the commonly used selection tests are not suitable for non-natives. Selection committees turn out to unconsciously prefer candidates that are closest to them in ethnic background and gender, and most committees consist of white males only. Giving all candidates a fair and equal chance proves more difficult than expected, and takes a real effort!

Introduction and Group Process

Each organisation has rules, and the larger part of these rules are never written down or even officially discussed. These are the informal rules. In the first weeks in a new organisation, one regularly breaks at least some of these rules. And while breaking some rules at the start is seen as part of the process and funny, it should not happen too often. Ethnic minority workers are at disadvantage here since it is more difficult to discover what the rules are when you are raised in a community with different types of rules. Thus, during the introduction period of ethnic minority workers, the mentor should take care to inform his or her mentee about the informal rules.

Explaining informal rules and helping a new colleague find his/her place in the organisation, is part of the process in the new workgroup. But will the new group member be accepted by the group? Especially when the new group member looks very different to the others (e.g. much darker skin) or has a very different way of speaking. This may cause a separation. It magnifies the differences, and ensures that the new person will not be seen as an individual but as a representative from his or her ethnic group. Differences are magnified, resemblances ignored, and all behaviour of the new colleague will be seen in this perspective. Since most stereotypes on ethnic minorities are negative, the new colleague is seen as possessing all these negative aspects. In order to break the negative cycle it helps to focus on similarities between the new colleague and the rest of the group. Further, it helps to create a common goal, preferably one that can best be reached by using the special qualities (whatever they may be) of the new colleague. More generally speaking a policy in the organisation that values diversity, helps to prevent this type of problems.

In most organisations, racist or sexist behaviour is part of the group process. One person may be responsible for the act itself, but often it is accepted or at least tolerated by the others. Sometimes victims complain and try to correct this behaviour, but they are in the most unfavourable position to do so. He or she may even think that all other group members agree with this type of behaviour, and feel all the more intimidated. Often, the real situation is different, and most group members do not like this behaviour either and would like it to stop. They just do not take action they do not feel responsible. It is important to change this situation: the confrontation with racist or sexist behaviour may result in high absenteeism, or people will leave the organisation because of it. This does not only apply for the direct victims of this type of behaviour, but also for others who witness this behaviour.

A group discussion on how everyone likes to be treated by others, and what they do not like, often helps to stop the undesirable behaviour. These discussions almost always result in a code of conduct that excludes racist and sexist behaviour, since most people resent it. By having this discussion with the whole group, all group members become responsible for the group norm, and it is no longer only the victims that feel a need to correct undesirable behaviour.

Evaluations and Promotion

At higher levels in organisations we often see only very few members of ethnic minority groups. Partly, this is due to the recent arrival of these groups in the organisation: they simply had less time to ‘march to the top'. Other reasons are a lack of a consistent mobility policy and biased evaluations of the capacities of minority workers. Finally, minority workers may refrain from applying for promotions because they expect resistance from their majority colleagues.

The lack of minorities in higher positions in the organisation implies that input from this group is absent from those places where important decisions are taken. This has a negative impact on the multiculturalisation process of the organisation, and may impair the performance in a multicultural society.

In order to improve the evaluation process and stimulate the promotion of ethnic minority members, it is important to make evaluators conscious of the stereotypes they have of ethnic minorities and how these stereotypes influence the way they perceive and evaluate their colleagues. Making use of checklists for the evaluation of candidates is another suggestion: it forces the evaluators to first decide on the aspects that will be evaluated, and to look at each aspect in each candidate. In this way, there is a better balance in the evaluation and the influence of stereotypes is decreased.