While advocating for equality of opportunity, UK Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch warned that a focus on “prejudice and discrimination” is “segregating people into groups.”
Badenoch studied STEM subjects in Nigeria as well as computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex, southeast England, completing an MEng in 2003.
She noted one barrier as to why some may underachieve in STEM was prejudice and discrimination, but it was not the only reason.
She said that there are also “cultural barriers, geographic issues: you live in a town where all the schools are terrible and there is no work.”
“One of the problems is everybody’s looking at that first pillar. It’s all about prejudice and discrimination and not about all the other things that you need to remove in order to get equality of opportunity,” she said.
“The more we talk about race and prejudice and discrimination in that particular way, the more we keep segregating people into groups and creating stigmatisation,” she added.
“It starts right at the root cause, which is what opportunity is available for people, wherever they are,” she added.
“So in some education, in terms of letting people know what their what their options are, is absolutely critical targets to make sure that companies don’t ignore the problem, but also targets that don’t encourage them to game the system and do something weird, that’s actually not resolving the problems of meeting both the spirit and letter of the intention,” she said.
When asked by the panel whether the government has a perception that girls shouldn’t do certain things, Badenoch said: “I don’t think anyone is saying that girls shouldn’t do certain things. I think that there is... we have to understand that there is a limit to how much government can do.”
Badenoch has made speeches explicitly naming critical race theory as the underpinning ideology which “sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression” and has warned that schools in the UK that teach “white privilege” as a fact are breaking the law.
