Humans have been collecting data on themselves for the better part of a thousand years. The Domesday Book, commissioned in 1086, was an act of national accounting before the word existed – every manor, every plough, every head of livestock was recorded as data for the new king. Magna Carta, a hundred and thirty years later, went a step further, capturing rights, obligations and exceptions in writing, so that the relationship between power and people could no longer be argued from memory. Since then, we have measured almost everything from births and deaths to trade flows, tax receipts, and footfall on a Saturday afternoon on Oxford Street. Data is, without exaggeration, one of the most important inventions civilisation has ever made.
But the thing about data – and anyone who has ever sat in a boardroom staring at the same set of numbers as the person opposite them and reaching a different conclusion will know this – is that it still needs to be read. A figure on its own is a fact, but a figure in context is an argument.
On Thursday, we launched our sixth report with the British Retail Consortium, where we collect a lot of extremely important data on the progress of diversity and inclusion in retail. The research covers 200 of the largest retailers in the UK, 54 BRC Charter signatories which represent a workforce of more than a million people, and the experience of more than 25,000 individuals captured through Retail Trust’s Employee Inclusion Index. Six years in, the dataset is large enough to do what shorter studies cannot – distinguish where there is genuine movement and where more work needs to be done.
The headline figure from the report is that half of all board seats in UK retail are now held by women. That is a figure that just a few years ago would have felt almost impossible to reach, and so should be celebrated for the achievement that it is. However, seeing what appears to be parity at that level could read as “the work is done”, when in reality, the majority of those board positions that are held by women are the product of non-executive appointments. Across the FTSE 350, in the critical roles of CEO, Chair and CFO, women hold just 8%, 17% and 21% of roles respectively.
Also telling are the figures on gender representation at ExCo and direct reports level, which sit at 46% and 45.6% respectively. On their own, these numbers look promising, but at direct reports level the figure has fallen from 50.5% and this is the real one to watch, as it shows a weakening pipeline into those leadership roles.
One leader we spoke to described their organisation’s leadership as “not very diverse at all.” Another, on disability, said representation in their business was “very, very low.”
Ethnicity tells a similar picture. As an area that has consistently struggled at leadership level over the full six years of our research, like gender, it was board that saw a rise, reaching 11%, but at ExCo and direct reports the numbers fell again. ExCo is now 7.4%, and direct reports is now at 5.2% – the lowest figure since our research began.
It is also important to read these figures in the context of qualitative data too, which is why we speak to so many leaders across the sector on where D&I is in their organisation. One leader we spoke to described their organisation’s leadership as “not very diverse at all.” Another, on disability, said representation in their business was “very, very low.” Those admissions are crucial to reading any statistics as they are the honest read from inside the room.
So when we’re thinking about data, the question I keep coming back to is the one about targets. More than half of the retailers we spoke to are stepping back from them, and the reasoning, broadly, is that the work is now embedded deeply enough in culture that a numerical target has become the wrong instrument. There is something in that as a target without belief behind it produces theatre, not change, and several of the leaders we spoke to were clear that culture-led inclusion was producing results that target-chasing never did. But, on the other side of that, as I mentioned earlier, data collection was invented to have evidence and records. So, it is perhaps telling that it is areas like ethnic diversity (where a quarter of retailers hold no data on this at all) which are falling behind in both how much data is held and progress on the representation itself. Can belief, without measurement be enough to sustain what has been built?
The broader it gets, the more places there are to look when you want to show momentum – and the easier it becomes to look away from the places you don’t.
This is a particularly important question as the agenda continues to widen with wellbeing, menopause, neurodiversity, social mobility becoming more and more prominent in the D&I conversation. Much of that reflects genuine progress in how organisations think about their people which is a positive step forward. But the broader it gets, the more places there are to look when you want to show momentum – and the easier it becomes to look away from the places you don’t. One leader described programmes for women and ethnic minority colleagues that were oversubscribed fifteen to one whilst another spoke about the difficulty of sustaining that momentum in a restructure year, when every role that isn’t filled is a pipeline that doesn’t move.
And then there is AI. The tools now writing job descriptions and screening candidates are not neutral instruments. They are trained on historical data, which means they are, in the most literal sense, trained on historical bias. “Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not” is the line from the research that has stayed with me on this. The industry has spent six years trying to correct for decisions that excluded people, but because it is now automating that process, it is in some cases, undoing that work faster than it was built.
What the data says about that in a few years’ time will depend on decisions being made right now. When we first started this research, the data was thin and the conclusions were tentative. Neither is true now. The picture is clear enough that the next six years will be genuinely revealing – about whether the progress is real, and whether the will to keep measuring it is too.
Read the full report here – I’d love to hear you thoughts.
