The Confidence Gap, Not the Commitment Gap
I sat with a room of people recently who all wanted to do better.
None of them were resistant and none of them didn't care.
What they were though, was scared.
Scared of saying the wrong word, or having a conversation about race go wrong in front of colleagues. They were also scared that trying and getting it wrong would cost them more than not trying at all.
We talk a lot about resistance in this work, because it exists. There are leaders that won't engage, there are individuals in teams that that roll their eyes, and there are organisations that are "just not ready."
But in almost a decade of sitting in these rooms, that is rarely what I actually find. What I find, a lot more often, is fear wearing the costume of resistance.
What the research says
This isn't just a feeling I've picked up. It has a name and a body of evidence behind it.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School researcher who coined the term "psychological safety," has spent decades showing that people go quiet at work for one reason above all others. They don't trust that speaking up, asking a question, or admitting they got something wrong won't be held against them. In her book The Fearless Organization, she argues that silence isn't apathy, it's self-protection. The same instinct that keeps someone from flagging a mistake on a project keeps them from raising their hand in a conversation about race.
And it cuts both ways. Catalyst's 2022 study of over three thousand employees from marginalised racial and ethnic groups across five countries found that 61 percent report being constantly "on guard" against bias at work, a figure that rises to 74 percent for LGBTQ+ employees from marginalised backgrounds and 85 percent for trans and nonbinary employees. The single strongest factor in reducing that vigilance wasn't a policy or a training completion rate. It was team psychological safety.
So the person worried about saying the wrong thing, and the person who has spent years bracing for what happens when someone does, are both responding to the same missing ingredient. Neither problem gets solved by a stronger statement of commitment. Both get better, slowly, when safety is actually built.
This isn't just my read on the sector, either. Universities UK's Closing the Gap review of the ethnicity degree awarding gap makes the same point at a policy level. Of its five recommendations for institutions, one sits apart from the governance structures and the dashboards. Equipping staff with the skills and confidence to have authentic conversations about race with each other and with students. So not a values statement. An actual capability.
Why this matters for how you close the gap
If the problem were commitment, the fix would be a stronger mission statement, a more visible pledge, or a leader saying the right thing more often. Most organisations have already done that. It hasn't been enough, and it was never going to be, because commitment is rarely the thing missing.
Confidence is built the way any other skill is built. Through small, low stakes moments, repeated often enough that the high stakes ones stop feeling so dangerous. Not a single training day, or a poster. Practice, correction, and permission to get it wrong without it becoming a story people tell about you for years afterwards.
If the people in your organisation have gone quiet, the more useful question usually isn't "why don't they care?" It's "what would it take for them to feel safe enough to try?"
If this sounds like where your own teams are, not resistant, just unsure how to begin, that's exactly what the Race Equality & Psychological Safety Training is built around. It starts small and practical, the kind of low-stakes practice this piece talks about, rather than another statement of intent.
If you'd like to talk through what that could look like for your organisation, I'd love to hear from you. Book a call https://tidycal.com/gracemosuro/20241014174023 or email grace.mosuro@aquaintzconsulting.co.uk
Further reading
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2018)
Catalyst, Emotional Tax and Work Teams: A View From Five Countries (2022)
Universities UK, Closing ethnicity degree awarding gaps: three years on (2022)