Asa Lindhagen, Sweden’s minister of gender equality with responsibility for anti-discrimination, has commissioned reports on how cities tackle race issues in the workplace. The first of them is due in March.
“Sweden is characterized by a culture where we don’t see skin color” out of racial sensitivity, said Katarina de Verdier, who’s working on the report for Stockholm. That makes tracking inclusion and discrimination difficult, if not impossible.
Top Swedish lenders acknowledge there’s a need to create a more diverse and inclusive culture. Swedbank AB, for example, has started an internship program for foreign-born students.
Still, with debate on race “almost non-existent,” it’s hard to have “a policy like Goldman Sachs on recruiting Black people,” said SEB’s Hamstedt.
Asa Nilsson Billme, head of diversity and inclusion at Nordea Bank Abp in Sweden, said since it’s “illegal” to track people by ethnicity of skin color, setting targets is impossible.
Liebig at the OECD says that banks are at risk of being laggards, when it comes to diversity.
“The financial services sector, especially banks, isn’t growing, and discrimination tends to be more pronounced in declining sectors as employers can afford to be more selective and to revert to doing what they’ve always done,” he said.
Not surprisingly, people of color or with foreign backgrounds are steering clear. Alexis Cousins-Culver left Barclays Plc in Sweden, saying she couldn’t fit in. The sector is “exponentially more closed-off and elite” than in New York or London, she said. When she agreed to relocate to Sweden for the bank, she “underestimated how excluded I would feel as the only woman of color without any prior Nordic education or background.”
She now works at the Stockholm School of Economics, turning to research to help better the industry from outside. But the problem is, “if you can’t track it, you can’t measure progress,” she said.
The financial industry’s “clubby environment” will eventually change, said Bo Becker, the Cevian Capital Professor of Finance at Stockholm’s School of Economics. “The industry will modernize and become more open.”
That change can’t come soon enough for George.
“The issues I experienced in 1996 are going on now, and if things don’t change it will happen to my daughter,” he said. “Yes, I am taking a risk by speaking out, but I am fighting for her.”
—With assistance from Katie Linsell.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.