black boys and white working-class boys are disciplined at school, how their work is assessed, and the academic ability set that they are put in. In 2017, the BBC contacted 50 of London’s 500 leading graduate employers to find out how many young black males they had hired. The results of the survey showed that only 30 of the 1,803 graduates recruited in 2016, were black males. The Survey also revealed a marked gap in wages between black Caribbean men and their white counterparts. “According to mental health charity Mind and corroborated by the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) Black men were more likely than their White counterparts to have mental health related disorder. This is higher in Black men than other ethnic groups. The report states that boys from African and Caribbean communities in the UK were shown to have lower levels of mental health problems at age 11 compared to White or mixed heritage boys. However, African and Caribbean men in the UK have a significantly higher likelihood of developing some types of mental health problems during their adult life. This does not occur in countries with a predominantly Black population and appears to be an environmental risk related to experiences in northern Europe and the United States. In 2020 Business in the Community (BITC) suggested that UK black professional representation had ‘barely budged’ since 2012 with only 1.5% of top positions held by black
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people, a 0.1 percentage-point increase in eight years. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that black men are less likely to be able to access opportunities to be sponsored or mentored to executive level and this is even in comparison to Black women as they may be perceived as more threatening than women. Unfortunately, this is also prevalent within the diversity and inclusion space where black men can be excluded in discussions of discrimination due to preconceived stereotypes. So, in our diversity discourse why should we focus on black men? The story can be summarised as follows, the invisibility of black men in leadership positions within other sectors, in engineering and certainly within the diversity sector should be a cause for concern. Because they are equally and, in many cases, disproportionately represented in discrimination cases, they are less likely to progress within our engineering spaces to leadership positions, as men when they share views with regards to discrimination they are perceived to have a gender advantage and their experiences are put in doubt. I gave birth to my first-born son at the start of lock down. As I think about the future, I want for him, I long for a world where the full expression of himself as a black man is not perceived as aggressive or as a threat to anyone. To create that world, we must devote ourselves to understanding the very complex issues surrounding inclusion, diversity, and intersectionality. Article by Dr Nike Folayan Article Reference list available on request
