Discrimination and Moving to the Receiving End

As a white, male, middle class, privately educated Oxbridge graduate I like to think I know a bit about privilege. I once thought I was doing my bit to try and level up the playing field as well, with positive affirmation towards minorities and putting all the right diversity and inclusion policies in place.

Then I was diagnosed with Cancer. I was very lucky, my life was saved by brilliant surgeons and wonderful NHS care, I regard myself as nothing but fortunate. But I was left with a permanent and visible disability. And since then, I have earned a lot about unconscious discrimination, and just how real it is.

While there is the occasional person who spots me heading towards a queue and breaks into a sprint to get there first, generally in both my personal and professional life everyone I run across has been incredibly solicitous and helpful. People have been astonishingly kind.

However, something has changed.

I have always led all our new business work, attend every pitch and chemistry meeting. Pre my disability, our pitch conversion rate was a healthy 40%. (With 4 or 5 agencies usually shortlisted, that’s pretty good). And pre-Covid, most of these pitches were face to face.

Post my disability, our conversion rate is 42%. It’s slightly improved – but only provided we pitch remotely.

If we pitch face-to face – our conversion rate drops to 8%. Quite the gap.

So what’s different?

In fact nearly all the agency team are the same (we have an astonishingly low staff turnover). The clients we are pitching for are all in the same key sectors we target. We’re doing the same sort of work. The only thing that’s changed in those face to face meetings is – my disability.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think for a second there’s any active discrimination going on here. No one is thinking ‘well those folk from Whistlejacket did the best pitch and their work will definitely make the biggest difference to my business but I don’t want to work with that chap with the stick’. That would be quite mad and it’s not happening.

But for some reason – and numbers don’t lie – when people see me in the room it seems our arguments are less persuasive, our work less alluring, our ideas less engaging.  And it happens so often I’m now getting to the point when I’m wondering if its best if I don’t go at all.

One very good friend I discussed this with suggested that perhaps I am now less convincing in meetings post disability – not so quick with my answers, not so deft at shifting ground as the currents of the meeting change. And I did seriously think about what they had said.

But on the whole, am I really less able to think on my feet just because I’m not so good at standing on them? And anyway, our (improved) performance on remote pitches would rather suggest that’s not the case.

We always ask for feedback. In one case, a client told me that they had only shortlisted two agencies after they had been through all the submissions, and going into the final meetings, we were the top score of the two. “But”, they went on, “having met you, we felt the other agency had better experience in our area”.

I’m sure the person who wrote that put all their attention on the second part of the sentence. But I struggled to get past the first 4 words. Having spent some weeks marking our submission, reviewing our case studies, our proposals, our ways of working, they had concluded we were the best. But once they’d met me,  we were only the second best.

I’m conscious there will be any number of clients I have pitched to (and lost) in the last 5 years reading this, and wondering ‘does he mean me’? So let’s be clear. We would have lost 60% of the pitches we did regardless of my disability, so in most cases there’s no evidence of even unconscious bias. Take comfort that statistically you’re probably in that cohort. And to reiterate – no one is actively discriminating against me.

But never the less, we’re losing 30% of the face to face pitches we would have won before I became disabled. It does seem that somehow, me strolling in with a stick reduces our credibility before we even speak.

So what to do?

Well – there’s not much to do apart from write articles like this, and try and raise consciousness about unconscious bias.

I’m not asking for any favours. I’d just like a level playing field.