Financial Times: Trevor Phillips - 'I don't trust self-identification'

Green Park’s Leadership Series analyses the ethno-cultural and gender diversity of the senior leadership of the Private, Public and Third Sectors. The findings of this data contribute to greater transparency and accountability regarding the current state of the UK’s leadership.

Green Park’s Leadership 10,000 (2017), an analysis of the diversity composition of the most senior roles in the FTSE 100, found that there had been a decrease of 18% in the number of ethnic minorities holding positions at Chair, CEO and CFO level in FTSE 100 companies.

The aggregate analysis of the Leadership Series cohort by gender and ethno-cultural background is derived from a unique program designed by Professor Richard Webber, best known as the lead developer of two of the most commonly used consumer classification systems in the world, Mosaic and Acorn.

This software uses a database of 1.2 billion individual records globally. It uses 2.5 million family names and 0.8 million personal names to generate algorithms that can associate individual names to gender, ethnic or cultural identity.

The software is tested annually against multiple samples where the ethnic and/or gender composition is known through other methods and achieved accuracy levels of more than 95%. For example, against a file of 40 million British adults, the software produces a population breakdown directly comparable to that of the 2011 census.

This article was published in The Financial Times on the 31st of May, 2018. To read the full article, click here.