It is not surprising that when the annual Commission for Unity and Racial Equality (Cure) workforce survey for 2006 was released ten days ago, politicians and the media seized on the decline in the proportion of blacks at the senior executive level, which fell by two percentage points from 27 percent in 2005 to 25 percent the following year.

That was gloomy news, since the universal hope must have been that black representation at the very highest levels of business would consistently rise until it was proportionate with the black share of the population.

Community and Cultural Affairs Minister Wayne Perinchief revealed that Cure had now developed legislative proposals for workforce empowerment, making it mandatory for industry to develop and implement equality of opportunity strategies.

“This proposed legislation will require Bermuda employers to review their policies and procedures to ensure that all racial barriers to opportunity are removed,” he said. “Additionally the legislation will require that employers provide evidence of this review and also evidence that plans and programmes are being implemented to effect race equity in their work environments.”

Mr. Perinchief’s message was clear. Voluntary empowerment programmes were not working, and the time had come to start mandating them.

On the face of it, that is not a bad thing, although, as ever, the devil is in the details.

Bermuda must ensure that blacks and whites in Bermuda enjoy equal opportunities, although it must be noted that the now admitted failure of public education — where the student body is largely black — puts black Bermudians as a whole at a profound disadvantage — before they enter the workplace.

Nonetheless, the need to narrow the wealth and career gap is very real, and the research that Cure has undertaken provides the kind of statistics without which any kind of reform is impossible.

And Cure’s statistics are very useful. They examine the whole of the workplace, not only by race, but by gender, Bermudian status and by income. There is not room here to go into all of the findings, but the picture is not as bleak as the headline figure of “black executive numbers decline” suggests.

Taken since 2000, there has been a substantial improvement in that figure, from 20 percent in 2000 (and just 16 percent in 2001) to 27 percent today. It is worrying that the figure has remained stuck at between 27 percent and 29 percent since 2005, but the long term trend is positive.

Cure also notes that executive management jobs make up only two percent of the workforce, the equivalent of 566 jobs. This means that change is dependent on a limited number of senior jobs that may become available in a period of 12 months.

Perhaps more importantly, there has been good progress in senior management (27 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in 2006), middle management (42 percent to 46 percent) while the proportion of blacks in the no-professional sector has shrunk from 65 percent to 61 percent in the same period.

No one should be satisfied with these numbers, of course. Forty six percent, perhaps the best number, remains below the number of blacks in the private sector workforce, at 53 percent, so there is still much work to be done.

Because Bermuda’s economy is so dependent on foreign labour, and because international business demands a level of senior management expertise that the Bermudian population may not be able to completely fill, it is worth looking at how black and white Bermudians fare, separately from non-Bermudians. Here, the picture is much more balanced, although it is still skewed towards whites, with 53 percent of executive management positions filled by whites compared to 43 percent by blacks. That compares to a 27 percent to 67 percent overall proportion. In senior management, white and black Bermudians are very nearly equal and blacks outnumber whites in all other categories.

So in all, while no one would pretend that the situation is perfect, it would be wrong to suggest that it is getting worse. As Cure says in the report: “— Black Bermudians are beginning to see higher levels of representation at senior management employment levels — If these gains continue at the current rate, there will be consistently higher and representative levels of the races in the workforce, regardless of equality of opportunity initiatives and interventions”.

Cure should do more to encourage training and diversity in the workplace, but in the long term, education has to hold the key, as advanced education remains the best indicator of career success. That should be a lesson for all of us.