#reboot​ Ritu Shirgaokar and Joerg Ambrosius Interview

Thanks, yes. So my role here at State Street is Head of International and Regulatory Legal. My parents emigrated to the UK from India in the late 60s. So as a child of immigrant parents, there are two experiences that I'd share with you which shaped me growing up. Firstly, from my early school years, I do recall a very strong sense of being different because of my color, left out, excluded, and at times bullied. My father signed me up for self-defense lessons, so for a couple of years I did karate, aikido, and jiu-jitsu, his wish being that I could protect myself if I needed to. And then one day, I must have been about 14 years old, someone did pick a fight with me at school in the school yard. There were a load of kids standing around in a circle, heckling and watching and cheering. And I did actually fight back. I had always been afraid to up to that point, but I think that day I felt equipped to. And I won the fight. And it was a real turning point for me because all of a sudden I found myself included and respected by my school peers in a way that had never happened before. I kind of became part of the crowd. And I realized then that if other people see you stick up for yourself, they do respect that. The other thing I'd share is that I had ongoing advice from my parents growing up that I would have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as anyone else in order to get the same chances in life. So that instilled a very strong work ethic in me quite early on. In the same vein, they did also push me towards the prestige professions because in their experience of coming to the UK, they felt that a high status profession would offer me a buffer from social inequality that they saw as inevitable because of my race and or my gender. So I took a law degree and fortunately I've never looked back. Whilst it's always been hard work, I've also always found it a privilege to be able to practice law.

In my view, what we're dealing with in the workplace is not conscious treatment of minorities. It's a collective of inherent affinities and it's collective that hardens over time to result in an unthoughtful approach generally towards minorities and the barriers that they face. It results in systemic racism where power and privilege remain in the hands of the white man, white majority. It results in a lack of role models, which then self-perpetuates because bright diverse background people simply make other choices along the way because they can't see anyone that looks like them at the top, so they just don't even believe it's a possibility to advance. So there is unconscious bias for sure, but I think there's also conscious bias and we need to be braver about recognizing that. So for example, if a manager is always channeling their top development opportunities towards one or two people who they consider to be top talent, and those people are not minority background people, then eventually they will create a situation for themselves where their minority background staff actually can't progress because they haven't had the opportunities. For example, in my world, they've never been on the big deals and they've never been on the prestige committees, and those are key factors to progress. So I wouldn't call that unconscious bias. I think that's a deliberate managerial approach, but we need to recognize the full impact that it has.

It's much easier to make changes in industry because we can use our workplaces as instruments of social change. And Jurg, you and I are doing that in our workplace. We are taking actions that are going to change outlooks, mindsets, and outcomes. With small enough communities to mobilize in industry, it's much, much harder to achieve broader social change through government policy. That takes a lot longer. So we can make things happen. As an industry, we're accustomed also to using our might, our economic power, to influence issues that are of direct relevance to us. I think we need to, as an industry, start to see the eradication of racial inequality as a directly relevant issue to us because ultimately it's about sustainability and about the survival of the industry. So I think we need to start positioning our might, using our platform on the issue across industry, and we need to start doing that now.

Thanks, Jurg. So I'd offer three points of advice. Firstly, as it's not a level playing field, you are going to need to push back at times, and it's important to learn the art of respectful challenge, which means knowing how to use your voice in a way that engages the other side with a sense of allyship into the issue as opposed to a feeling of offense or avoidance. Second point of advice I would offer is that most minorities do suffer more acutely from imposter syndrome, and the best counterbalance to that is to have a strong network. So be deliberate about creating your network of friends in work, outside of work, professional mentors and family, people you trust to offer you balanced perspectives. And use those relationships, get those perspectives, because that's what will keep you balanced and centered as you face difficult decisions as you go through your working life. And finally, I'd say working life is tumultuous, so it's important to make some time for disappointment and setbacks. Make space for that. Everybody comes up against setback and disappointment in their working life, and generally more than two or three times. The quality I've always admired the most in colleagues is when I have seen them take a bit of a blow, but it doesn't shake their sense of self-belief or their confidence longer term. They pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and they go on to bigger and better things. So I think an important part of being resilient is recognizing when to move on and draw a line under things.