Exploring the impact of ethnic ambiguity.
Of all diversity issues, the recruitment of people from ethnic minority backgrounds remains high on many employers’ agendas. The principle is apparently straightforward: workforces should reflect the local or national population in terms of the ethnicity of employees.
However application of this principle is often difficult and requires a careful consideration of demographic employment patterns. For example, an employer in Swindon can reflect the local community with only 2% of its workforce coming from minority groups, but in Leicester the figure would need to be 26%. For employers looking for specific skills, the picture is even more complicated as industry participation by minorities will vary between industries. For example, the engineering and medical professions have very different ethnic profiles.
Faced with these issues, many employers who are keen to improve the ethnic balance of their labour force, have seen advertising in the specialist ethic press (on- or off-line) as the obvious solution. Thirteen years ago, a major utility was pairing all recruitment advertising in mainstream media with supporting insertions in the ethnic press. Today the ethnically-focused titles still carry high volumes of ads, with new titles – such as ‘Works for Me’ – still emerging. However the effectiveness of this type of advertising has always been debatable. The utility mentioned above did not make a single appointment from its insertions in the ethnic press.
There is a growing acknowledgement that the readership habits of members of a minority group are not that different from majority groups; readership is determined by educational background and employment patterns. In this context, effective recruitment from ethnic minorities may be more a question of tailoring the message rather than segmenting the media.
There has been plenty of research in this area in recent years, from ‘Reaching the ethnic consumer’ by Mediaedge to our own survey ‘Diversity in the graduate recruitment marketplace’. Such research has highlighted the great difficulty in producing effective minority advertising. For example, the habitual use of minority role models in advertising is seen as positive by some, but stereotypical, tokenistic and even offensively patronizing by others.
The truth is, minority groups are not homogeneous and so no single ad is guaranteed to connect with all groups. It’s interesting that when non-white minority ethnic characters do feature in ads they are disproportionately black rather than Asian.
Against this background emerges the new concept of ‘ethnic ambiguity’ or EA. This idea recognises the increasing tendency that young people will identify with no single ethnic group. Observer journalist John Arlidge comments: “EA embraces both real demographic changes and fashion in the entertainment industries”.
Although this trend first emerged in the US it is now growing in the UK. Almost one million Britons identified themselves as members of more than one race or of 'no race' in the 2001 census – the first in which respondents could choose their ethnic origin. 'Mixed Race' is now the third largest ethnic minority group in Britain and is set to become the biggest over the next decade.
As Vic Motune of the Voice says, “Many black and Asian people define themselves by what they do, where they live, where they went to school, by fashion, music, style and ambition. The salience of colour across society is reducing.” In the US, academic Evelyn Hammond, a professor of the history of science and Afro-American studies at Harvard, recently told the New York Times that race was an 'invented concept' used “to categorise perceived biological, social and cultural differences between human groups”. He maintains that the concept of race is now nearing the end of its useful life, at least for the youth market.
Clearly this type of trend has an impact on media usage: people who classify themselves as EA are likely to be infrequent users of ethnic titles. Is there then any argument for the use of minority media such as the ‘ethnic press’ as part of a recruitment campaign? After all, EA is just reinforcing trends towards the mainstream that are already exhibited by many members of minority groups, particularly the young.
We believe the answer is a qualified ‘yes’. Firstly, although they may not be the first choice for generating immediate response, they may have a valuable role as brand-builders, with a long-term impact on recruitment effectiveness. Secondly and more importantly, they are liable to be most effective when used to target specific community groups in a specific geographical area.
For example, a town like Slough has a very high concentration of Sikhs in the community, and it would therefore make sense to use titles such as Punjab Times, Planet Punjab, Punjabi Son and Diwali. None of these have especially well-established recruitment sections, but they do have good reach in the Sikh community.
Knee-jerk reactions to diversity issues have never been a good idea. But now more than ever, employers need to think very carefully about what they want to achieve and what is the best way to achieve it. As always, this is the difference between lip service and effective action.
Graeme Wright is a media and research specialist in the knowledge workshop at work.
