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Black women applying to police forces are three times as likely as white women – and men – to be rejected, a Media Storm data investigation has found.
Despite their growing notoriety for institutional sexism, UK police forces were at least able to claim they had achieved gender parity in recruitment, with male and female applicants enjoying equal success rates of 20% during Police Uplift, the three year Conservative-led recruitment of 20,000 officers which ended in March 2023.
Yet, Media Storm’s data, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, shows that while one in five white female applicants got in, only one in 14 black women did.
When stripped to binaries, we forget about intersections. And there’s one intersection that is often forgotten above all others: the intersection of gender and race, especially when it comes to black women.
As our data shows, failing to look at the intersections often hides more than it reveals. In this case, positive discrimination for white women has hidden acute discrimination against black women – and allowed it to continue unabated.
Speaking about ‘misogynoir’ – the layered and ingrained prejudice against black women – criminologist Dr Marina Hasan told the latest episode of the Media Storm podcast that our “race is always seen as black men’s issue, gender is always seen as white women’s issue. So black women always fall through the cracks”.
Her research documents specific forms of bullying and harassment reserved for black women in the workplace. “I found evidence of subordination; sexualisation of black females; a distrust of their accounts,” she said. “Stereotyping is a very, very big issue for them. Disparity in disciplinary and misconduct hearings.” The list goes on.
That’s why Marcia Ore and Karen Geddes (two of the only black women they know to have ever endured 30 years of working for the UK police) launched the first national policing conference specifically for black women this year.
Women in the Shade is “about getting black women’s voices heard,” Marcia told Media Storm. “We’re absolutely unapologetic about that.”
Media Storm presented its findings at the conference “to gasps around the room”, Marcia recalled. For many, it provided unequivocal, statistical validation for something they had suspected but had been too easily gaslit into disbelieving, being the sole black woman in their department.
Noticeably, the gasps around the conference room came from predominantly black women, because it was predominantly black women at the conference.
“It’s interesting,” observed Marcia, “because nowhere did we say in any of the marketing material that white people weren’t welcome. What we said was that it was focused on black women.”
This is the heart of the problem: the fact that mainstream society considers intersectional discrimination a marginal issue for people in the margins.
“We’re not excluding our white colleagues, black men, white men, or anybody else,” Marcia said, “because we cannot do this alone. If we want to make improvements in terms of equality and diversity and equity, then it has to be everyone pitching in.”
One woman who has experienced the worst of police misogynoir, yet has done some of the best work to counter it, is Mina Smallman.
Her two daughters, 27-year-old Nicole Smallman and 46-year-old Bibaa Henry, were murdered in June 2020, their bodies found in Fryent Country Park in Wembley. Two Met PCs were jailed for taking photos of their bodies and sharing them in degrading WhatsApp messages. Mina has always pointed to racist police neglect and abuse throughout the ordeal – yet continually seeks to bridge divides in the discussion.
“I don’t want any sides,” she told Media Storm. “This affects all of us: all of us were born from a woman, all of us have female members in our family. We’re all invested in the safety of women and girls. That’s my only agenda.”
For Mina, this has meant sidelining intersectionality in her approach: “I elected to broaden my brush from just women and girls of colour to all women and girls.” But that is more to do with strategy than reality: “My sisters are the lowest on the rung, be it health, be it work, be it whatever. They are my people. I want it to be remembered that a woman of colour, a girl of colour – we are the last to be considered in every aspect of this world.”
In what she calls “a gift from God”, Mina has forgiven the man who murdered her daughters. But she has not forgiven the systems that failed to protect them, “the institutions that are failing, and feel it’s appropriate to cover up the truth… God hasn’t given me the gift of freedom from that because he needs me to have that fire in my belly”.
Mina has channelled her pain into a constructive campaign and wants to help others do the same. July will bring the launch of her memoir. A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength is characterised by pragmatic optimism. Because, for all that she has endured as a black mother of two murdered daughters, Mina sees this as a time in which change is finally within reach.
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“We have an opportunity, a moment in time, where police officers now have firsthand experience of what it feels to be a black person, because they now know what it feels like to be under unfair scrutiny. Not trusted. Everyone’s watching you, everyone’s deciding whether you are good or bad. This could be the pivotal point where we deliver the best support and be the best human beings we can be.”
Let’s hope the institutions listen.
Media Storm’s latest episode ‘Mina Smallman: Misogynoir, survival, and A Better Tomorrow’ is out now