How we’re working towards racial equality in Greater Manchester’s tech industry
In the wake of Black Lives Matter, it’s become even more clear that we all have a lot of work to do. Work to keep people safe, as COVID-19 disproportionately impacts people of colour and police violence continues to impact lives.
Finally, making daily headlines and hearing voices that have long needed to be heard, there is a recognition that this is only the beginning.
Beyond the visible issues we now all see, we have work to do in making sure that people from BAME communities feel belonging in the places they live and that like white people, opportunities are afforded based on their skills and abilities and not overlooked in response to the colour of their skin.
For the Greater Manchester Responsible Tech Collective, nowhere is this more apparent or pressing than in the city-region’s digital ecosystem.
While the past few months have been an opportunity for us all individually to listen, learn and start addressing the parts we personally play in systemically entrenched and culturally inbuilt racism, we now have the power to come together and address tech’s racial inequality issues collectively.
With a mission of bringing home the humanity to tech, the potential in Greater Manchester is huge.
As a richly diverse region — averaging 16% of people hailing from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in comparison to the 14% national average — our burgeoning tech scene offers opportunity in abundance, but looking around our big tech, the plethora of digital agencies plus co-working spaces, the question has to be asked. Where are the people of colour?
With people of colour contributing to just 4% of current tech talent in the U.K., Greater Manchester’s issue is no different than the wider tech industry, but how we approach it can be. Especially when you consider that organisations that are making strides when it comes to ethnic diversity are 36% more profitable according to McKinsey.
Knowing the impact lack of diversity can have on the people tech aims to serve too — racist facial recognition, risk scoring and credit rating algorithms as a starter for ten — the technology we create is dependent on who creates it, and with a wealth of talent right here on our doorstep, there are no excuses.
No excuses, especially when you realise that people of colour are educated to a higher level than white people across the U.K. The idea and fallacy of a meritocratic world we’ve created have meant that people of colour need to overachieve to succeed — while our stereotypical beliefs about them, subconscious or otherwise, continue to impact their ability to get a foothold in the industry.
For the white, mostly male and more often than not heterosexual and able-bodied tech leaders amongst us, and everybody else in positions of leadership, we need to start asking what happens, in our recruitment process first and then within our organisation, that prevents people of colour from finding an opportunity in our industry.
At the GM Responsible Tech Collective, we’ve been asking ourselves these questions too.
Starting this project back in March this year focussing on race and cultural inclusion in the industry, the project team we had in place while diverse in many ways, was predominantly white. Black Lives Matter woke us up to the opportunity we had in front of us, to live and breathe this project in its delivery as much as through its outcomes.
Now led by Annette Joseph (Diverse & Equal) and Vimla Appadoo (Honey Badger), we’re exploring how we might empower workplaces to be more inclusive so that all ethnicities can feel safe at work. In doing so, we need your help, as we explore how Greater Manchester can become the most inclusive tech network and ecosystem in the world.
Our ambition is to design and build a prototype that helps set a standard for organisations of all sizes. We want to design and support inclusive working environment best practices. We want to understand and benchmark organisations so that the city-region becomes an industry leader for inclusivity, productivity and innovation.
We’re looking for individuals and organisations who want to help co-create and pilot the standards we’re shaping and best practises we’re building, but first, we need to understand. Whatever your role or ambition when it comes to working in digital and tech — and wherever you work—help us out by filling in this survey here first.
