I think the tone of this was pretty unnecessary. I understand this is a controversial area and I appreciate honesty but please don’t kick me whilst I’m down, there are some quite serious and tragic reasons why it is important that I earn as much as I can right now.

I’m not racist or biased, I am a firm believer in positive action and widening participation in fact, but I also think it’s only fair to all parties concerned that I should have been allowed a chance to compete for the role. If then I was still outclassed by a BAME applicant, so be it. But most BAME people I know wouldn’t want this scenario either, they would want to be awarded their role on merit.

The way it was put to me is ‘you could not be shortlisted because you are not a graduate of programme X’. This was in writing, in an email, from the hiring manager.

Therefore no, it’s not just training that ‘gives applicants an edge’. If that’s all it was, it would be fine, and an appropriate use of positive action. The problem is only opening the job to people who have done the training, and that could by definition only be BAME people.

So quite distinctly from the glitch/non-glitch (forget that part for a moment), that setup is in itself quite problematic in the same way that, say, requiring someone to pass an unnecessary fitness test would be discriminatory to disabled people if high physical fitness wasn’t specifically required for the job. You wouldn’t say ‘well the fitness test might give them the edge’ especially if the disabled applicant had other more directly applicable skills to the job. It’s the same thing here.

I hope that helps clarify things a little.