Haymarket Publishing Services Ltd.
Regeneration and Renewal
March 2, 2007

Fewer directors have Anglo-Saxon names

Holly Sutton

People living in the UK with names of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon origin
are much less likely to be a director of a business than people with
more ethnically diverse names of East Asian, Muslim or Sikh descent,
according to a new ethnic and cultural classification tool.

The new figures from data analyst Experian, obtained exclusively by
Regeneration & Renewal, use names to roughly calculate the ethnic and
cultural origins of the UK’s adult population.

Using this tool to predict the ethnicity of UK business directors
shows that people with Jewish and Armenian names form the most
entrepreneurial ethnic group, with 7.23 per cent of them being
company directors. They are followed by people with Nordic, European
and East Asian names.

On the other hand, people with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon names are
respectively the second and fourth least likely ethnic groups to be
company directors: 2.5 per cent of people with Celtic names and 2.83
per cent of people with Anglo-Saxon names are directors.

But people with African names are the least likely to be directors,
as just 2.25 per cent of people in this group are directors.

The Mosaic Origins tool was built by Experian in conjunction with
Professor Richard Webber from University College London. It can be
applied to any list of names to establish its cultural and ethnic mix
– in this case the list of first named directors filed at Companies
House – and to analyse trends, such as which ethnic groups dominate
which industrial sector.

Experian has tested the tool against census results and found it
identifies the ethnicity of both Muslim and European names with 99
per cent accuracy and for all but two of the other groups with at
least 78 per cent accuracy.

Hamid Rehman, director of ethnic minority research company Ethnos,
said that while people from many ethnic minority backgrounds may be
likely to own a business and so be a director, often these firms are
smaller than those run by Anglo-Saxons.

‘Employment rates have always been low in ethnic minority groups so
they have to rely on setting up their own business to make a living.
If you looked at directors of publicly-listed companies it would be a
very different story,’ he said.

In addition, the data reveals specific communities working in
particular trades. For example, people with Muslim names own almost a
third of UK leather goods manufacturers, while people with Indian and
Sri Lankan names own a quarter of all dispensing chemists.

Professor Webber said that this shows there is ‘a very high level of
specialisation in different ethnic groups’.

Former community cohesion tsar Ted Cantle said the research offers
evidence for the occupational segregation of minority and white
communities. ‘Work is a place like school where people get to
understand more about one another,’ he said. ‘If people segregate
themselves by race at work, then there is no opportunity to do this.’

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress