The Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) has a pretty diverse team: we are somewhat biased towards women, and in fact represent the inverse of our treasury community in that respect, but in terms of ethnicity, 25% of the team are of BAME background and half of us come from a heritage that is not white British.
A whole range of languages are covered and before lockdown – and during – we have been known to share tips on cuisine, books and other things we might not normally have access to, if we remained in our ‘single culture’ boxes. This is something I really appreciate and enjoy about the ACT. In fact, one book recommended to me by a colleague that I have found fascinating is Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené.
You might ask: what’s a middle-aged white woman doing reading such a book? I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get an insight into the struggles young black women face, as well as the talent out there that’s being ‘missed’, it would seem, by so many.
The authors point out that in Britain black girls are ‘largely rendered invisible’ within the education conversation. Where black children start school in line with the UK average in terms of literacy and numeracy, they fall behind as they enter secondary school. What’s more, different black groups are lumped together when they ever are looked at, which makes it hard to observe real trends.
However, black girls tend to do better than black boys academically, and also better than working class white boys and working class white girls. This has the unfortunate outcome that they are not given any real focus. When faced with navigating a system not geared to support them, they will often make choices where they feel they are most likely to succeed – hence not fulfilling their true potential, or indeed only coming to it later on in life (which explains an age disparity versus white students at, for example, Southbank and Middlesex universities). Similarly, their parents will make choices for them that ‘navigate’ the system rather than change it.
One study shows that black children are the most concerned about how teachers view them and are less likely to feel their teachers would describe them as clever. “Black girls are shown fewer leniencies than their white counterparts, and are written off as problem children more quickly,” the book maintains.
This ties in with conversations I have had with young black women in the workplace, who learned to suppress their assertiveness as it was interpreted as aggression, resulting in the labels ‘bully’ and ‘troublemaker’. A 2017 US study shows that, starting as young as age five, young black girls are viewed by adults as being less innocent and more adult-like than white girls, and in 2013–14, in the UK 10% of black girls were suspended from school versus 2% of white girls.
Why do I mention these facts? Really, I want to play my part in ensuring that our community understands the challenges black women in particular have to go through currently, despite the fact that statistics around their capabilities demonstrate a group of people extremely valuable to the workplace. And I’d like to see more black women, as well as of course black men, as treasurers, specifically outside of African countries.
The initiative the ACT is trying to launch – which offers free qualifications to individuals from BAME backgrounds – is moving forwards. I hope we will be in a position to go live in the final quarter this year. It is really important for those communities to become aware of careers in treasury, which we all know are very fulfilling, but could sometimes be described as a rather well-kept secret!
If you would like to support this initiative or have any comments, please contact Eleni Souli at the ACT.
Caroline Stockmann is chief executive of the Association of Corporate Treasurers