International business head David Ezekiel said his sector was doing its bit to address race and gender disparities in the workplace.

Mr. Ezekiel, who is head of the Association of Bermuda International Companies (ABIC), said: "There's an historical gap that needs to be closed but international business is doing a great job in closing it.

"You only have to look at our own survey of employers and employees which show the bulk of training dollars get spent on Bermudians."

ABIC's training and education awards have given full play to race and gender diversity, said Mr. Ezekiel.

"It's a little bit naive to relate salaries levels just to racial and gender backgrounds without doing a similar study to see how salary levels relate to education levels.

"And what we may find when we look at that is that rather than Bermudians, particularly black Bermudians being left out of international business they may have been left out by decades of an education system that simply hasn't provided what it needed to provide.

"It is at the root of much of the disparity and everyone recognises this. The frustration is over whether the changes are happening quickly enough?

"Education Minister El James has certainly made it his focus, one hopes he's a success but the success has been slow.

"At the end of the day if you are not getting the quality and quantity of the entry-level people you are just going to take longer to change the numbers we are looking at."

If anyone wanted answers to inequalities then ignoring perhaps the most important aspect to hiring educational background was wrong, said Mr. Ezekiel.

"I don't believe people see a race bar. Certainly having worked in international business with the majority of leaders of international business I can assure anyone who looks there's nothing resembling a race bar in international business."

He conceded there could be pockets of prejudice within the industry but added that HR departments in international business were highly populated with black Bermudians.

"So when I look at the gap, the predominant reason is not racial bias," he said.

Of course suspicions will probably continue until blacks begin to populate the upper reaches of management, rather than just the middle rungs. The lack of black role models at the very top is obvious.

But Mr. Ezekiel said: "I think we have got some. People are getting much more comfortable with it.

"Certainly the banks have Phil Butterfield and in the international sector we see bright guys like Patrick Tannock at ACE and people coming up. I think it is happening.

"There is a frustration among everyone that it is not happening fast enough."

And Mr. Ezekiel urged caution until the statistics were broken down further and said international business is doing a much better job than the race and gender statistics suggest.

"We have to do a good examination of the numbers and find out if they are being skewed by a small number of highly paid executives who are the job creators.

"We take the numbers seriously but until we find exactly what's in there it is tough to respond."