Real Estate Balance with the aim of improving diversity and inclusion in the industry so that it better reflects the society it serves. This latter bit about ‘society’ is, in my view really important since arguably the ultimate clients and users of property are the whole of society in some form or other. How on earth can we claim, therefore, to understand what those users want – and build more successful businesses on the back of it - if our industry is run by just a small sector of that society? The principal challenge with trying to improve diversity at more senior levels in an industry is that it is not something that can be achieved overnight. You cannot simply magic senior and suitably qualified women or indeed ethnic minorities out of thin air when looking for new recruits to a company’s leadership team. It’s a bit easier at board level where the pool for non-executives is marginally better – but that’s not where our focus lies. At Real Estate Balance we want to see better balance in middle and senior levels so that when promotions to the very top come to be made there is a fair chance that the end result will be gender and ethically balanced as well. The gender diversity of recruitment to our industry – which is frequently through the chartered surveyor route – is improving (I’ll come back to ethnicity in a moment). The RICS records that 28% of newly qualified surveyors are women. My concern is that we need to be sure we are going to retain these and the other women joining our industry through the middle management years when sadly in the past many have simply given up and exited the industry. The principal reasons for this exodus, apart from the obvious issues to do with the cost and availability of childcare, seem
to have more to do with organisational culture – presenteeism, playing the necessary games to make sure you get to the top, the requirement to socialise in a way that simply doesn’t fit with family life. And that is why at Real Estate Balance we started by working with property industry CEOs to help them understand what they needed to do to lead that cultural modernisation from the top. We have 92 CEOs signed up to our ten CEO Commitments – all names that are well known in the industry and determined to lead by example. Our next step is to work with more of the cadre of middle managers within the industry to understand what barriers still exist to their career progression and ultimate journey to the top. I make no apologies for the fact that Real Estate Balance started off with a strong focus on gender diversity within the industry. My own view was always that if an organisation’s culture encouraged true gender diversity then it would almost certainly be a culture that would be welcoming to LGBT, BAME and disabled employees. But as the discussion around Black Lives Matter has shown, the situation is rather more complex than that and in terms of ethnicity the roots of the problem are likely to be different. My suspicion is that the property industry still recruits from too narrow a base to be in a position to tap into the racial diversity of our society and that if we want a racially diverse pipeline from new recruits through middle management to the very top then we are going to have to make more effort as an industry to get into schools and communities and show that property can provide a career for a much wider range of people than it does at present. There are already some great campaigns – Changing the Face of Property, Pathways
to Property, and the work of the Chartered Surveyors Training Trust in providing apprenticeships from socially and racially diverse backgrounds. But it is all too diffuse - and too small scale. We need to come together as an industry to solve this problem and whilst Real Estate Balance can – and will - endeavour to support and if necessary co-ordinate these many different initiatives we are simply not sufficiently resourced to shift the dial on our own. Finally, I must mention the impact of the Covid crisis. At one level, it is of great concern that the female component of the workforce is perhaps experiencing more than its share of job losses and the burden of increased childcare/homeschooling. But on a more optimistic note, it also seems to be the case that those organisations that are culturally more diverse and already operate flexibly have found themselves better placed to withstand the challenges posed by Covid and the need to radically alter working practices. And, of course, what the home working revolution has totally undermined is the culture of presenteeism and the idea that in order to succeed you need to be in front of the boss all the time. So I guess I am more optimistic than I have ever been that the dial is truly shifting in the real estate industry when it comes to diversity and inclusion – but before we get too pleased with ourselves we should acknowledge that there is still a long way to go; that this is a challenge that will take some years to beat; and that we shouldn’t allow crises along the way to derail us from an ultimate prize that will make us better and more successful in giving society the real estate that its diversity requires.
Cambridge University Land Society 2020
17