Positive discrimination can reduce unconscious bias as Chris Game explains, citing the United States as an example.
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While campaigning, Barack Obama would carry a pocketful of lucky trinkets given him by supporters: a lucky poker chip, a small Hindu Monkey King statue, a bracelet worn by a soldier in Iraq, a tiny Madonna and Child. In baseball-speak, he was covering all bases.
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It evidently worked – in November’s election, and again on Sunday, when he struck lucky with the teams contesting the first Super Bowl of his presidency.
It was a real cliff-hanger, the Pittsburgh Steelers beating the Arizona Cardinals through a spectacular final touchdown in the last minute of a nearly four-hour game. And the Steelers were Obama’s team – ‘other than the Chicago Bears, probably the team that’s closest to my heart’.
Chancy, you might think, backing so openly a team not even from his home state. But less so perhaps, with their opponents happening to represent the state whose Republican Senator, John McCain, he defeated in that November presidential election. That’s lucky.
And easier still given the enthusiasm with which the Steelers’ lifelong Republican owner, Dan Rooney, endorsed Obama’s candidacy in April, four months before he’d secured the Democratic Party nomination.
The two men of different generations, colour, and radically different backgrounds share a clear mutual respect, one key cause of which is American sport’s famous Rooney Rule.
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Here I should emphasise, for the next few paragraphs, ‘football’ means American football, not Beckham’s ‘soccer’.
Which prompts the thought a Rooney Rule in this country would probably be something like: ‘A yellow card at least every three appearances or they’ll think I’m getting soft’. Happily, Dan’s version is more elevated.
It’s not a law, simply a requirement that, for all head-coach vacancies in the National Football League (NFL – the body that runs the Super Bowl), the team must interview, ‘in good faith and with an open mind’, at least one minority ethnic candidate, or be fined.
The rule was introduced in 2003, when Rooney became chairman of the NFL’s diversity in the workplace committee – of which there’s not even a distant equivalent in our football. To understand why Rooney – though not, back then, many other team owners – felt it necessary, you need only compare professional football with basketball.
Both have large majorities of black players: 70 per cent in football, 80 per cent in basketball. In 2002, though, while 48 per cent of basketball’s head-coaches were black, football’s figure was six per cent, two from 32 NFL teams.
The explanations, openly discussed, illustrate the nature and pervasiveness of racism in American sport. Football, it was argued, is far more complex than basketball. A pro football team has an ‘active unit’ of 53 players; basketball 12.
Football coaching teams therefore have to be bigger and more hierarchically organised. Each team has hundreds of ‘plays’ to be co-ordinated and communicated to players through more complicated technology than in basketball.
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In short, selectors would agree, for the combination of intellectual, managerial, and leadership skills required by a head football coach, there is little point in looking outside the pool of white applicants – much the same argument, incidentally, as is applied to the game’s so-called ‘thinking position’ of quarter-back, overwhelmingly dominated by white players.
Rules alone can’t change attitudes, eliminate prejudice, or break ‘old-boy’ networks. But they can change public behaviour, and the Rooney Rule did. It did not force teams to appoint candidates they would have ignored, but they were forced to meet them face-to-face.
Tony Dungy, black head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, described it as slowing the hiring process, ensuring selectors talked to candidates outside ‘the known quantities, the known names, the high Q ratings’ – referring to the marketing measure of the familiarity of a popular brand, person, or TV show.
The Rooney Rule is an example of affirmative action.
The AA term, though, is as inflammatory in the US as here, and Rooney chose different language. The rule, he assured team owners, was a temporary thing to address not decades of blatant discrimination, but the ‘unconscious bias’ that crept into hiring.
It made its mark. By 2006-07 there were seven black NFL head coaches, including those of both 2007 Super Bowl teams. And the Steelers’ head coach on Sunday, Mike Tomlin, was not only the youngest-ever Super Bowl winner, but the second African-American.
So, if affirmative action can work there, why not here? I don’t mean necessarily in football, although statistically the need is even greater than that confronting Dan Rooney. In the top four English leagues about a quarter of the players are black, but, following Blackburn’s recent sacking of Paul Ince, just one manager: Macclesfield’s Keith Alexander. It’s hard to be too critical, though, when our politicians set so feeble an example. I’m thinking of the Parliamentary representation, or under-representation, of women and ethnic minorities.
In today’s House of Commons there are 125 women MPs: under a fifth. In the international league table it puts us in an embarrassing 60th position, just behind beacon of enlightened democracy, North Korea. There are 15 ethnic minority members, about two per cent.
Investigation of 60th place reveals two more embarrassments. First is, perhaps surprisingly, the table is not headed by Scandinavian countries, where women have long had a prominent role in public life. The Scandinavians are all in the top 12, but top are Rwanda’s 56 per cent of women MPs, with Argentina, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and Spain having between 33 and 40 per cent.
These are young or developing democracies, most recently freed from civil war or military rule. Yet their legislatures are more descriptively representative – looking, feeling, acting like the people they purport to represent – than our own ‘Mother of Parliaments’.
The second embarrassment should be shared by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, for 94 of the 125 women MPs are Labour. On their own, the nine Lib Dems would be in 82nd place, and the 17 Conservatives a distant 110th.
The message is essentially the same: rules matter. The Rooney Rule almost immediately increased the number of black head-coaches. The emerging democracies set enforceable quotas for women, and sometimes other minorities, either as parliamentary seats or on candidate lists. And Labour used all-women shortlists to select candidates for the 1997 General Election and dramatically increase women MPs.
Rules are only a start. Neither 22 per cent of black head-coaches nor 27 per cent of Labour women MPs are proportions to get excited about, but in their respective organisations the rule changes have kick-started a change.
* Chris Game is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
Chris’s past Post columns can be found at: inlogov.bham.ac.uk/staff/Game.shtml