White men endangered species' in boardrooms: Tesco chairman John Allan
White men have become an “endangered species” at the top of British business, Tesco chairman John Allan has said.
Speaking at a business conference, Mr Allan said: “For a thousand years men have got most of these jobs. The pendulum has swung very significantly the other way and will do for the foreseeable future. If you are a white male, tough. You are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard.
“If you are female and from an ethnic background and preferably both, then you are in an extremely propitious period,” he added.
Mr Allan earns £6,50,000 a year and is one of nine white men on Tesco’s executive board, according to Independent. He took over from Sir Richard Broadbent, another white man, in 2015. Tesco’s board has no full-time female executives, the Independent report said.
The proportion of female directors among FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 companies is 26 per cent, while only 10 per cent of executives at those same firms are women. According to reports last year, only eight per cent of those directors were not white. By contrast, people from minority ethnic backgrounds made up 14 per cent of the UK’s workforce at large, the Guardian reported.
Later, he told the Guardian that his comments were meant partly in jest and were taken out of context. “The context was [that] I was talking to a bunch of aspiring non-executive directors, many of whom were women, and I wanted to give them some encouragement and, therefore, I used that rather colourful turn of speech,” he said. “And the audience, I think, was quite amused.”
Mr Allan’s comments have caused outrage with activists, politicians and business experts calling for shoppers to boycott Tesco. Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality party, said: “Far from being in a ‘propitious’ position, any analysis of senior leadership roles in business will show the woeful under-representation of women and minority groups.” She pointed to data released by the Fawcett Society this week that showed the pay gap was influenced by racial and gender inequalities.
