I have recently been to a number of meetings to discuss the best way to try and convince broadcasters and production companies to combat hidden prejudice and increase “on-screen” diversity.
How can we make companies change their practices and be more receptive to putting more black people, women and disabled people in front of the camera or even on our radio airwaves?
At these types of meetings eventually someone always says something along the lines of:
“All the broadcasters and production companies care about is money, it’s called the entertainment business for a reason. It’s not a black and white issue - it’s a green issue! We have to show them how it’s in their business interest to employ more black people, women and disabled people”.
The argument is normally that if you increase onscreen diversity you can attract larger audiences and generate more money (I paraphrase for brevity).
While I agree that we should use every instrument and every possible argument available to us to increase diversity I am incredibly uneasy about the economic argument. The reason I am uneasy is that the economic argument can cut both ways.
In 1995 American economists Robert W. Brown and R. Todd Jewell published a seminal paper on racism and spectator attendance in college basketball. What they discovered is that white people are willing to pay more money to see white players than black players. In fact a highly skilled white college player generated over $100,000 in per game revenue as compared to around $30,000 for black players of equal talent. This provided a massive incentive for colleges to discriminate against recruiting black student athletes. College basketball teams also generate extra money by winning - both through prize money and due to the fact that people prefer to pay to see a winning team. This meant that college teams had to do a bizarre balancing act. They may well generate more profits if they lost a few of their games but had more white players than if they won all their games with an exclusively black team.
Now I am not aware of anyone doing a similar study when it comes to television but that is my concern. What if we discover that audiences are happy to have one or two black fronted drama series but more than that and they start to turn over? I have no idea where the profit maximizing line is for on-screen diversity and more importantly neither do the people who argue this case.
Economics is funny like that. Once profits become your main argument it can produce perverse results.
Let me give you one more example:
If we rely on economics for the basis of why we should increase diversity we may find that diversity is increased in some areas but reduced in others. For example gay men are perceived to have far larger disposable incomes than disabled people (I do realise the two groups are not mutually exclusive but bear with me please). This would mean that for advertisers (the life blood of most commercial television) it would make sense to increase sexual diversity and decrease disability diversity.
Now I suspect that there are several good economic reasons to increase diversity in businesses generally – the media being one of them. Prof. Lucy Marcus of the IE Business School has done some great work to show that more diverse management boards are usually (not always I hasten to add) more profitable than none diverse board. The reasons are several but include; drawing on a broader talent pool and avoiding “group think” amongst other things.
Increasing diversity in media is important. It is important as it is one of the largest industries in the UK. It is important because you cannot have a functioning democracy if the media does not represent the needs and concerns of everyone. It is important if you want a society that is at ease with itself. And if we are lucky increased diversity will also generate more profits for the companies working in the media.
But please let’s put people before profits.
