An uncomfortable truth

EDITOR’S COMMENT It would be very easy to talk about the Budget here this week, but who wants to take the easy road? And, if you want the best and most comprehensive overview of what Rachel Reeves’ pre-Halloween announcement may mean for the real estate sector, then you’re best off heading to www.egi.co.uk/news.

What I do want to talk about here is something that may not be easy reading.

We’re just coming to the end of Black History Month and I’m more than a little disappointed to say that we haven’t done anything specific in the pages of EG over the past month to celebrate, highlight and showcase the Black talent we have in the real estate sector, nor have we done anything to poke the industry into doing more to attract, retain and promote Black talent in our sector.

It would be easy for me to roll out a number of excuses as to why we haven’t done that. We very purposely didn’t do anything around International Women’s Day because the flurry of e-mails coming in from various PR departments asking us to highlight this or that female only served to annoy. Why weren’t those e-mails coming in every other day of the year too?

This month I didn’t receive a single e-mail from anyone in the sector wanting us to profile any Black talent in the industry.

So why didn’t we do anything? The honest answer is I don’t know. Laziness perhaps. Unconscious bias. Perhaps the very fact that our industry remains overwhelmingly white and the conversations our entire team have had throughout the last month have been with white people. Black History Month hasn’t been front and centre for us because we haven’t seen it. We haven’t been part of it. There has not been enough action out there in the market.

I could make an excuse that we don’t need to deliver specific content around Black History Month because we’re already showcasing diverse talent across the EG suite of products. But that would be an untruth.

Yes, we work really hard to make sure our events are diverse and we’ve worked extra hard over the past few years to make sure that’s more than gender diversity, but have we done well enough? Absolutely not. 

Then I took a look back through the pages of EG over the month of October. We had just four images of Black people throughout some 200 pages of content and four images of brown faces. The majority of that diversity was in the coverage of our Real Estate Futures event, an event designed specifically to showcase and encourage diversity in our sector. Of the stock images we used over those 200 pages, only one wasn’t of white people – or white hands in this case.

This really isn’t good enough and isn’t EG doing what we hope and believe our purpose is – to showcase real estate as a brilliant industry in which to build a career and to help and support this industry to be as successful as it possibly can. To do that we need to highlight the talent in it, the opportunities in it, the need for diversity, inclusivity and equity.

So, while we at EG may not have utilised Black History Month in a way that we could have, that we should have, to show the immense Black talent there is in this industry and remind our sector that there is so much more that we need to do to open up the built environment to all, we promise that we will do more.

Perhaps as Diwali begins, there is an opportunity for us to shine a light on all our diverse talent, to lean in and learn about different cultures, backgrounds and views, and to remember that this business that we’re in, a business where we get to create amazing spaces and places, will only be built back better if we make it inclusive for all.