Three ways to combat Islamophobia in the workplace

In Jan­u­ary, Con­ser­v­a­tive MP Nus­rat Ghani alleged that she had been sacked from her job as a junior min­is­ter at the Depart­ment for Trans­port in 2020 because of her faith.  

Ghani, the first Mus­lim woman to address the House of Com­mons from the dis­patch box, told The Times that her “Mus­lim­ness was raised as an issue” dur­ing her dis­missal. She claimed that she’d been informed by a senior par­ty offi­cial that her sta­tus as a female Mus­lim min­is­ter had been “mak­ing col­leagues feel uncom­fort­able”. 

Islam­o­pho­bia – a type of racism that tar­gets Mus­lims and peo­ple per­ceived as Mus­lim – has become a wide­spread prob­lem in UK soci­ety. More than 45% of reli­gious hate crimes record­ed by police nation­wide in 2020–21 were Islam­o­pho­bic in nature, accord­ing to research for the House of Com­mons.  

It’s a dai­ly real­i­ty in the work­place for many Mus­lims. Tah­mi­na (not her real name) was work­ing as a wait­ress in a restau­rant when she heard a col­league describ­ing her to a cus­tomer as a “ter­ror­ist”. When she informed the own­er about this, vis­i­bly dis­tressed by the slur, he failed to han­dle the sit­u­a­tion to her sat­is­fac­tion.  

The day after the inci­dent, when Tah­mi­na asked the restau­ra­teur whether he’d spo­ken to her col­league about his Islam­o­pho­bic remark, “he said that he had”, she recalls. “He’d told him that ‘women are more sen­si­tive about these things’ and warned him to be more care­ful with his ‘ban­ter’.” 

He took no fur­ther action.  

Islam­o­pho­bia at work can take sev­er­al forms that, while they may not be as brazen as the above exam­ple, are just as per­ni­cious. Zeinab (anoth­er pseu­do­nym) was work­ing as a man­ag­er in an office where two employ­ees join­ing the com­pa­ny imme­di­ate­ly assumed that she was there to clean it.  

“It took them a while to wrap their heads around the fact that I was their man­ag­er,” she says. 

There was worse to come: a senior man­ag­er went out of her way to make her job as dif­fi­cult as pos­si­ble. She would issue instruc­tions to Zeinab, who fol­lowed them to the let­ter, yet would reg­u­lar­ly be told that she’d got things wrong. 

The con­stant ques­tion­ing of her suit­abil­i­ty for the job wore Zeinab down. She grew tired of her boss’s prej­u­dice-dri­ven cam­paign and quit the com­pa­ny. 

There are numer­ous steps that employ­ers can take to tack­le Islam­o­pho­bia in its many guis­es, accord­ing to inclu­siv­i­ty spe­cial­ists. 

Rethink the hiring process 

Anti-Mus­lim bias by employ­ers can have an impact on its vic­tims before they’ve even set foot in the work­place, notes Khy­ati Sun­daram, CEO of recruit­ment plat­form Applied. 

“It’s not uncom­mon for Mus­lim can­di­dates to lose out on jobs sim­ply because of their iden­ti­ties,” she says, cit­ing a 2017 study by BBC TV pro­gramme Inside Out Lon­don that test­ed whether recruiters dis­crim­i­nat­ed against appli­cants with Mus­lim-sound­ing names.  

The researchers found that ‘Adam’ was three times more like­ly than ‘Mohamed’ to be invit­ed for a job inter­view, despite hav­ing oth­er­wise iden­ti­cal CVs. This kind of bias is reflect­ed in the fact that a study pub­lished by the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics in 2020 found that Mus­lims had the low­est employ­ment rate of any major reli­gious group in Eng­land and Wales. 

Tra­di­tion­al recruit­ment pro­ce­dures in the UK are rid­dled with prej­u­dice, accord­ing to Sun­daram, who adds: “Fos­ter­ing inclu­sive cul­tures and cre­at­ing equal oppor­tu­ni­ties for all groups means over­haul­ing the entire hir­ing process.”  

Employ­ers first need to widen the pool from which they’re recruit­ing, which could entail active­ly seek­ing tal­ent from mar­gin­alised groups, she says.  

When appli­ca­tions come in, they should be anonymised before the recruit­ing man­agers see them. A candidate’s name will say noth­ing about their abil­i­ty to do the job, but it could cause bias among selec­tors, uncon­scious or oth­er­wise.  

This approach, which Sun­daram calls “skills-based hir­ing”, helps to make recruit­ment choic­es more objec­tive by pre­vent­ing “bias­es about reli­gion or ‘cul­tur­al fit’ from cloud­ing hir­ing deci­sions”. 

Prioritise education 

It’s cru­cial to give employ­ees the knowl­edge and tools that will enable them to detect Islam­o­pho­bia. So says Sonya Bar­low a diver­si­ty coach and the founder of Like Mind­ed Females, a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty ded­i­cat­ed to reduc­ing inequal­i­ty at work.  

She adds that “ally­ship train­ing” will also enable col­leagues to pro­vide “sup­port­ive, safe and inclu­sive envi­ron­ments where all employ­ees – no mat­ter how they choose to express their faith – feel like they belong”. 

The pro­vi­sion of some basic reli­gious aware­ness train­ing is an impor­tant way of “com­bat­ing harm­ful prej­u­dices, uncon­scious bias­es and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices”, accord­ing to Bar­low.  

She cites the exam­ple of the hijab (head­scarf). Some peo­ple may not know why a Mus­lim woman might choose to cov­er her hair in pub­lic. Such a lack of aware­ness can lead them to make igno­rant com­ments and/or assump­tions about her abil­i­ty to do her job. Explain­ing to them why the hijab is part of some Mus­lim women’s iden­ti­ties can pre­vent these sorts of respons­es, which can in turn prove impor­tant in enabling Mus­lims to feel more com­fort­able in the work­place. 

Set an example at the highest level 

Bar­low stress­es that the edu­ca­tion process should not stop at one aware­ness course. If peo­ple are to become gen­uine allies of their Mus­lim col­leagues, a well-con­sid­ered train­ing pro­gramme, prop­er­ly embed­ded in the company’s cul­ture, will be need­ed.  

Busi­ness lead­ers, she adds, also need to “set an exam­ple for every­one about what con­sti­tutes appro­pri­ate behav­iour – and call out any mem­ber of the team who dis­plays a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry atti­tude. They need to be advo­cates for diver­si­ty and true allies.” 

Such inter­ven­tions could give col­leagues fur­ther down the hier­ar­chy the knowl­edge and con­fi­dence to tack­le Islam­o­pho­bia them­selves – and also help more Mus­lim peo­ple feel a much-need­ed sense of belong­ing at work in the UK.