 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Helping a friend register with the CITB and they want to know what Race he is. There's a long list to choose from and "White British" is at the top. He's not particularly fussed, but surprised.
As I tick the white British box I'm not deemed a minority. Most folks involved in construction are white British and male.
I imagine it's for their Stats and figures. Eg (my made up figures) 10 years ago only 1.5% were non white, now that is 1.56%
I guess so they can work out the various ethnicities in construction? or just to wind people up?
Normally a monitoring thing isn't it? "How many of our members are of South Asian ethnicity and how does that compare with proportion of the population." Type thing.
Statistics - they want to show that they are registering all races equally, or detect whether any races appear to be being discriminated against.
Stats. A long time ago I filled in the dofe annual forms at the school. Had questions from dofe hq about how I planned to get female numbers up. Quite difficult in an all boys school.
So they can work out how well their industry represents the UK as a whole and hopefully identify and address any racial imbalances etc.
Random factoid about France
Race is such a taboo term that a 1978 law specifically banned the collection and computerized storage of race-based data without the express consent of the interviewees or a waiver by a state committee. France therefore collects no census or other data on the race (or ethnicity) of its citizens.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/race-policy-in-france/
I would assume to evidence they are not discriminating against certain groups and hopefully encouraging a more diverse and representative construction workforce.
Same reason as for job applications and things I suppose. If there's something you're interested in changing, e.g. proportion of ethnic minorities or whatever, you need to be able to measure it to see if it's changing or not, or whether any of the things you're doing are having any effect.