Racial and sexual discrimination is keeping Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women out of employment. By Sam Mangwana.


The report, ‘Ethnic Minority Female Unemployment: Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Heritage Women’, identifies discrimination at every stage of the recruitment process and calls for greater attention on how unemployment is affecting ethnic minority women.

The scale of disadvantage is devastating - up to three times the level of unemployment for Bangladeshi and Pakistani women compared to white women (it is also more than double for Black women). 

This is not mere coincidence - with researchers estimating that 25% of ethnic minority unemployment is down to prejudice and race discrimination - this is not some secret shame of the past, but an urgent problem that must be tackled now. 

As a second generation Indian with an African sounding name, I was particularly saddened to read that, in order to secure a job interview, those with African or Asian names have to make twice as many applications as those who do not.

Growing up I had hoped that this kind of discrimination was the stuff of an older generation's fears - not something to hold us back in the twenty-first century.

The London Olympics this summer showcased to the world how international and diverse Britain is.

Yet, even though direct race discrimination has been unlawful - with no defence - in this country throughout my lifetime, it is an alarming blow indeed to learn that the unemployment gap for black women (compared to white women) has remained constant since the 1980s, and actually worsened for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women since 2004. 

As an employment lawyer, I see how these statistics play out in real life.

It's just not realistic to expect out-of-work job applicants to individually take employers to tribunals - that's not a workable solution. 

The current government has decimated the budget of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, originally set up specifically to tackle this kind of discrimination.

It has lost two-thirds of its staff and 60% of its budget in the last year, effectively destroying its ability to take any kind of proactive action about situations such as this, faced by job applicants.  Yet we see from statistics like these just how sorely urgent action is needed.

Sam Mangwana is an employment solicitor with Slater & Gordon Lawyers