Workplace discrimination prompts ‘whitened’ job applications

Jorden Berkeley, a black 22-year-old university graduate from London, spent four months applying for jobs but getting no responses from bigger companies, and offers from elsewhere that were limited to unpaid work experience.

Then a careers adviser suggested Miss Berkeley drop her first name and start using her middle name, Elizabeth.

“I did not really understand this seeing as my name isn’t stereotypically ‘ethnic’ or hard to pronounce, but it was worth a try and I changed it anyway,” she said. “I have been getting call backs ever since.”

She added: “I have many, many friends who were effectively told to ‘whiten’ their CVs by dropping ethnic names or activities that could be associated with blackness. It was a very sad realisation.”

Unemployment rates among ethnic minority women have remained consistently higher than for white women since the 1980s, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) said in its report.

In 2011, the overall unemployment rate for ethnic minority women was 14.3%, compared with 6.8% for white women. Among Pakistani and Bangladeshi women it rose to 20.5%.

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