Universities best at eliminating racism in Scotland's not so diverse workplaces ?

From research into equal pay carried out in 2012, it is now clear that the ethnicity of the public sector workforce varies significantly across the different sectors.  Best performer in terms of the employment rate of BME people is, as table 15 shows, the university sector with 6.1% of the workforce identifying as BME. 

Poorest performers in this context are Councils, with a BME employment rate of just 1.12% across that sector.  Other public bodies have a BME employment rate of 1.51% while Health Boards have a rate of 2.34%.

Equally critical to any analysis of real measures of performance on and evidence of race equality in this context is the extent to which workers continue to decline to identify their ethnicity to their employer.  This is an area of work on which the public sector has long conducted an elaborate dance of avoidance.  The figures in table 15 reveal that Health Boards are poorest performers in this context with 31.9% of the workforce not confident about providing an ethnic identity.  Councils are little better with an ‘unknown’ rate of 21.4% and the other public bodies are at a similar level of 20.3%, while the universities are again in the lead with an unknown rate of 13.4%.  Combined with the highest employment rate of BME people found in universities, the data would suggest that the rest of the public sector could well learn from the universities in how to improve performance and evidence of race equality in the employment context.

This data has been shared with the Equality & Human Rights Commission and with Scottish government.  Neither body has announced any urgent plans or desire to get everyone else in the public sector to learn from our universities.