The UK's leading accountancy firms appear to have a distinct lack of ethnic diversity at partner level, responses to our annual Top 60 survey would suggest. Many firms refused to divulge information regarding the ethnic make-up of their management teams when replying to our survey, making it impossible for Accountancy to produce a clear set of results in this area. The responses we did receive indicate that only 3.8% of partners at the 42 firms that volunteered such information are from ethnic minorities, although the data received was not comprehensive enough to produce a table of results. Caroline Gooding, a director at Diversity Works London, believes companies are too focused on being seen to help women up the corporate ladder, at the expense of promoting racial diversity. 'Certain diversity initiatives benefit all excluded groups, but most professional services firms have concentrated on trying to crack the gender penalty by getting women up the management scale,' she said. That's good - but with ethnicity, the focus has tended to be about getting people into the organisation in the first place.'
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