NatWest plans to increase BAME presence at highest levels

October 22, 2020

British lender NatWest on Tuesday promised to raise the number of Black staff in its senior positions to 3% by 2025, in line with the Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) population in England and Wales.

Roughly 1% of NatWest’s 8,800 senior staff are currently BAME. NatWest’s wider BAME targets are meant to increase the number of BAME staff in senior roles to 14% by 2025. NatWest currently has one BAME colleague, Yasmin Jetha, on its board, but no BAME executive or board members.

The pledge follows a four-month review of the experiences of the bank’s Black staff. “That led to us having very open and, on occasion, very emotional and difficult conversations with our colleagues about their lived experience,” NatWest’s chief executive, Alison Rose, told The Guardian newspaper.

“NatWest’s move is in the right direction and to me it seems more likely to be a more structural change,” Alper Kara, a professor of finance at Huddersfield Business School in the UK, told DW. “Even if it is for marketing purposes, if implemented successfully, it will inevitably lead to some level of fundamental change in the organization,” he added.

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Alison Rose | CEO von NatWest Holdings (picture-alliance/StockPix/T. Murden)

NatWest’s chief executive, Alison Rose, said she had had very emotional and difficult conversations with colleagues about their lived experience.

Perception bias

A survey of nearly a third of NatWest’s 63,000 staff found that while 79% felt all employees had the same opportunities at the bank, that dropped to 28% among its BAME workers in the UK. Only 63% of Black staff felt they could “be themselves” at work without worrying about whether they would be accepted, compared with 93% of non-BAME colleagues.

“It isn’t a bad move, obviously,” Nels Abbey, author of the book Think like a white man told DW. “But in two or three years there will probably be a new management board and a new mantra,” he said, adding that everyone wants to be “on the right side now, but actions speak far louder than words.”

Abbey pointed to former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, as a case in point. “In 2011, he [Clegg] acknowledged the problem many ethnic minority businesses have had in getting finance from banks, but soon after he was out of office and the issue was pushed back under the carpet,” he says. When the government published its comments on the report it did not deny the figures, but wrote that there was “no evidence to indicate that disparities are due to racial discrimination per se.”

A recent survey by Business in the Community (BitC) found that Black people held just 1.5% of the 3.7 million leadership positions across the UK’s public and private sectors in 2019. There are 1.28 million people working in finance and insurance in the UK, of which 196,500 are from a BAME background, according to labor market statistics from the Office for National Statistics. Added to this, nearly two-thirds of Black and Asian business owners felt unable to access state-backed loans and grants in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to research conducted for MPs.

“I certainly think that having more BAME senior managers in banks would be a remedy to tackle the causes,” Karas said. “On the cultural front, BAME senior managers, coming from a similar cultural background, may have a better understanding of BAME borrower behaviour and perhaps tailor suitable products and systems accordingly to provide more access,” he added

Other banks go the same way

Lloyds Banking Group has set a similar target of 3% for Black staff in senior roles, which will mean recruiting or promoting about 168 more Black employees by 2024, from 40 now. The current low number of Black staff at Lloyds is “not pretty,” Lord Woolley, founder of Operation Black Vote told the Evening Standard newspaper, but he welcomed that the bank admitted there was a problem. “It’s a two-stage process,” he said. “First you must lay bare the uncomfortable truth, and second you must set aggressive targets to put it right. Lloyds has done this, but it remains to be seen in five years’ time if they deliver,” he added.

One of the UK’s biggest investment firms LG says it will use its vote to put pressure on bosses who don’t make their top teams more diverse by 2022. HSBC meanwhile has pledged to “at least double” the number of BAME people in director-level positions by 2025. Britain’s biggest business lobby group, the CBI, has unveiled a campaign to get at least one ethnic minority person onto every FTSE 100 board and every FTSE 250 one by 2024.

Aviva, Microsoft UK, Deloitte UK and Linklaters are among the first signatories to the campaign, Change the Race Ratio. The CBI’s 2021 goal for ethnic diversity on FTSE 100 boards was recommended by the government-commissioned Parker Review in 2016, and earlier this year that report’s author said the target would be “challenging” to meet.

Meanwhile, the UK Race at Work Charter, a government initiative launched in 2018 to tackle ethnic disparities in the workplace, has not seen many banks sign up, with laggards including BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Macquarie, MUFG, Mizuho, Nomura, RBC Capital Markets, Societe Generale, Unicredit and Wells Fargo, all of which have large City operations. And only Standard Life Aberdeen, Legal General MG Prudential and Schroders have signed the charter among large fund managers.

Slow progress

The Bank of England has increased the number of minority staff in senior management positions by just one percentage point in four years, according to data in its annual report. The proportion of BAME staff occupying senior positions has risen 7% this year, up from 6% in 2016. The central bank has a target of 13% for BAME representation at senior management level by the end of 2022. At Goldman Sachs only 4% of executives, senior officials and managers are BAME and at Citi, only 2%.

Despite 74% of employees in the financial sector confirming that working with a diverse workforce is an important factor for their happiness at work, almost half (46%) said diversity seemed like less of a priority in the workplace, with 52% saying it should be more of a priority, according to a report from Culture Shift. The same report also found that 53% of employees in banking and financial services said their employer made token gestures that felt surface level when it came to diversity and inclusion.

Some 80% of employees in banking/financial services said working at a company with an ethnically diverse workforce was important to them, with 84% stating that working at a company with a good reputation for treating employees fairly was integral to their happiness at work.

For many, however, there won’t be a real change until the government steps in — something former Prime Minister Theresa May’s government promised to do after the Parker Review. May launched a consultation on making it mandatory for companies with over 250 staff to report their ethnicity pay gaps — the difference between what non-BAME members of staff get in average pay and what people from BAME backgrounds earn.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

The ‘Gone with the Wind’ controversy

Following the global Black Lives Matter protests, will there be a reassessment of film history? The popular classic “Gone with the Wind” was temporarily removed from WarnerMedia’s streaming platform, HBO Max. The film’s depiction of the slaves’ lives was idealized and not representative of their reality, admitted the company.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Soon with a critical intoduction

But “Gone with the Wind” will soon return to HBO Max with an introduction by a film expert providing more historical context on the film. Still, the case raises more questions, as many other movies from the past portray ethnic and racial prejudices that were widespread at the time.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

A mythmaker: ‘The Birth of a Nation’

The most famous and innovative film of the American silent film era was “The Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith. The three-hour historical epic from 1915 depicts episodes from the US Civil War. The representation of African Americans is grossly distorted in this film, too: They are either depicted negatively, or they voluntarily comply with the ideas of white Americans.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Blackfacing: ‘The Jazz Singer’

And how should we deal with this film in the future? “The Jazz Singer” from 1927 is one of the most famous works of film history, as it was the first feature film with a synchronized soundtrack. Main actor Al Johnson, who was a renowned white singer and entertainer, performs in “blackface” in the movie — a practice which was common at the time, but is now widely considered to be racist.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Redfacing in Westerns

Similarly to blackfacing, “redfacing” refers to non-Native Americans wearing feathers, warpaint, etc. and perpetuating stereotypes, which was often the case in Western films, such as in “Taza, Son of Cochise.” The 1954 film was directed by Douglas Sirk, born Hans Detlef Sierck, a German who had fled the Nazis in 1937.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Cult film: ‘The Searchers’

“The Searchers” is another prime example of the conflicting evaluations of a movie based on morality, aesthetics or history. John Ford’s Western from 1956 is described as a masterpiece and one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. On the other hand, it also propagates racist stereotypes — should the work also be reassessed?

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Racism in Vietnam War films

Many other influential, award-winning films have been criticized for being racist, and not just against African Americans. The 1978 war epic “The Deer Hunter” was criticized for its one-sided portrayal of all the North Vietnamese as sadistic racists and killers. Other critics pointed out that the film’s focus on white US soldiers was not representative of the situation during the Vietnam War.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Reassessing ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Co.

Even though it’s an acclaimed cinematic masterpiece, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979) also focused on the portrayal of its white characters, while the Vietnamese were simply nameless stereotypical figures. How should we address such films in the future? And beyond the influential works, there are a bunch of very bad Vietnam War films — what should happen to them?

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

The Japanese man in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Racist humor was very common in Hollywood films in the early 1960s ⁠— and depictions of Asian characters were particularly stereotypical. One famous example is in the film classic “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Mickey Rooney’s “comic” portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, the upstairs neighbor of Audrey Hepburn’s character Holly Golightly, has since been condemned as offensive anti-Japanese propaganda.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Latinos in Hollywood: ‘Maid in Manhattan’ and Co.

Latinos make up 18% of the total US population — the largest ethnic minority in the country, according to a recent DW study. This also leads to stereotypical representations. The rom-com “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) stars Jennifer Lopez, who falls in love with a politician (Ralph Fiennes) staying at the hotel where she works. Are the clichés of the lower-class sexy Latina girl acceptable today?

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Germans in Hollywood

Many Austrian and German actors who fled the Nazis lived in exile in Hollywood, where they were mainly offered roles as Nazi characters ⁠— like Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser (left) in the film classic “Casablanca” (1942). Even years after the war, German-speaking actors were often cast in these clichéd roles.

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Nazis to this day: Christoph Waltz and Co.

This cliché can still be observed today. A relatively recent example is the German-Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who portrayed an SS leader in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). It was definitely a brilliant acting performance, but one can still wonder why German-speaking actors are still given so many Nazi roles in the new millennium…

‘Gone with the Wind’ and other stereotypical depictions in film

Restricted screening conditions for Nazi propaganda films: ‘Jud Süss’

Some films directed under the Nazis with the direct goal of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda have been removed from distribution. For example, “Jud Süss” (1940) can only be viewed for study purposes with an introduction explaining the historical context and the intended impact of the film.

Author: Jochen Kürten (eg)