Is The Alphabet Dictating Your Success? Part 1
By themselves surnames do a very good job of sorting people in an unbiased way. But that was until the alphabet took over. The alphabetical use of family names is supposed to offer the ultimate in equal treatment; the fairest and most indifferent form of grouping people into manageable structured units. The twenty-six letters available offer ample room to manoeuvre. However, the alphabet has covertly assumed so much power it has become the final arbiter in our future, allowing no appeal, while it creates an elite which is subconsciously rising to the fore, resulting in the most unequal method of selection in all spheres of our lives.
Ken Adey, noted that one teacher (a Mrs Warner) felt she was being discriminated because of her gender whenever she applied for a head of department's post. But after careful research in the UK in 1986, he concluded that her lack of success owed more to her surname, the first letter of it, in fact. He had observed 89 candidates for 26 teaching posts and, though all the posts were filled, only 5 candidates were appointed from the bottom half of the alphabet!
Controlled by the Alphabet
It seemed that a simple alphabet of letters, an innocuous string of abstract characters, had taken a stranglehold on our lives so that the most important aspects of our existence were continually being dictated by it. What Ken Adey probably didn't realise then, was the endemic nature of the alphabet's negative effects. The education sector was by no means unique. So has anything changed since 21 years ago? Not much, according to the overwhelming evidence available now. The effects are still remarkable and even disturbing.
We deal with the alphabet so much, it has become an automatic process, buried deep within our subconscious. With each new selection for a person or thing, we mentally stop at A and anything after that assumes less and less importance. Thus, in any interview situation, one of the most important occasions in our lives, it seems we are often not selected on what we have to offer, but on whether we can better the first one or two rivals ahead of us, placed there purely by an arbitrary alphabetical system.
It can be of no surprise then that people with surnames in the top third of the alphabet (A-H) have got it made. First in the queue for everything, they remain right at the forefront forever. This conscious awareness of automatically being first, propels them forward subconsciously, to maintain this position at all costs, especially in their occupations.
The evidence is all around us. The most successful people in government (Bush, Blair, Brown, Carter, Clinton?), education, business, the arts, training and the media are from a privileged elite who claim first access to everything by virtue of that magical letter which begins their surname. Despite the overall popularity of the letters R, S and T, they seem to pale into insignificance behind A, B or C. Yet the only noticeable difference is the gap of 18-20 letters which separate them; a gap which precipitates a mental readjustment that appears to create 18-20 more negative aspects for those unfortunates lower down the order.
Related Tags: success, career, job, interview, alphabet, family name, candidate, department, surname, seniority
ELAINE SIHERA (Ms Cyprah - http://www.myspace.com/elaineone and http://www.elainesihera.co.uk) is an expert author, public speaker, media contributor and columnist. The first Black graduate of the OU and a post-graduate of Cambridge University. Elaine is a CONFIDENCE guru and a consultant for Diversity Management, Personal Empowerment and Relationships. Author of: 10 Easy Steps to Growing Older Disgracefully; 10 Easy Steps to Finding Your Ideal Soulmate!; Money, Sex & Compromise and Managing the Diversity Maze, among others (available on http://www.amazon.co.uk as well as her personal website). Also the founder of the British Diversity Awards and the Windrush Men and Women of the Year Achievement Awards. She describes herself as, "Fit, Fabulous, Over-fifty and Ready to Fly!"
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