A friend of mine has just landed a new job directing an observational documentary for BBC1. He’s a great director, his self-shooting skills are second to none and he just happens to be black. The series he will be working on has nothing to with ethnicity and is not about racism. This is exactly the kind of example that people interested in diversity in the media, like myself, are trying to achieve all the time: People chosen for their ability, working on a broad range of work irrespective of their race, gender, disability or any other characteristic that should be completely irrelevant. So why am I not ecstatic? Why is it not ‘mission accomplished’ as George W Bush would say?
The fact is this is not his first directing gig, it’s not even his tenth. He has lost count of how many documentaries he has produced and directed. Sometimes he will have three programmes one after the other to work on. Other times he won’t have any work for months on end.
Talking to him he says he can’t complain - he knows that other people don’t get as much work as him and in many ways he is quite fortunate. But over a coffee he described his dilemma:
“What I have are ‘jobs’. Sometimes I get great ‘jobs’, sometimes I have not so great ‘jobs’. But I look at a lot of my colleagues and what they have are ‘careers’. I get no sense that the jobs I get are going to add up to anything.”
My friend is not alone.
One of the biggest battles in increasing diversity in television is about creating careers and career structures for people from diverse backgrounds.
The first thing to identify is that different groups may have different career paths, and these different career paths need to be recognised and valued.
Let me give you one simple (and possibly obvious) example. The career paths of women are different from men. If we simply treat everyone the same we will disadvantage women. It wasn’t until the last 20 years that the television industry really began to recognise the impact that maternity leave and raising children can have on a career path (women still do the vast majority of childrearing). It wasn’t enough to give men and women the same opportunities to apply for jobs and expect them both to have the same careers. Women’s career paths needed to be acknowledged and policies such as flexible working hours needed to be implemented. Countries with the most flexible working hours legislation have the smallest gender gaps in employment.
My concern is that while this difference in career paths has at least been recognised for women, it is hardly discussed for people of colour and with disabilities working in television. The result is that many end up having ‘jobs’ and no ‘careers’.
Two very quick examples.
The first is related to factual television. In this genre people have to break through the barrier of non-directing Assistant Producer to being a Director. It is a big step and many people find it difficult irrespective of gender, race or disability. However, over the last ten years I have seen a very clear path develop. The Assistant Producer becomes a self-shooter and effectively becomes a second camera on shoots. As people gain more confidence in them they start to shoot entire sequences by themselves and eventually people trust them with a crew. Finally they start directing all by themselves. It isn’t easy to do, but it now seems to be an accepted career path.
A career path - that is - for someone who isn’t disabled. Self-shooting is a very physical activity and is incredibly difficult for people with certain disabilities.
So when an executive producer wants to get an AP that can self shoot, they may well overlook the disabled person who - through no lack of talent - hasn’t got that experience. They don’t have to be prejudiced to discriminate. There’s a structural problem.
Here’s the second example. It’s about the path to senior management in the BBC.
The path often proceeds as follows: A person works at the BBC for a number of years; leaves the BBC to “prove themselves” outside in the cut-throat commercial indie sector; then returns at senior level to the corporation. Sometimes, BBC senior management are then even poached back by the commercial sector.
Many black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people try to follow this path and leave the BBC - but then their careers stumble. This is because they don’t usually have the same wide range of informal contacts in the industry that are so vital to get on in the commercial sector. In turn, this is because the BAME employment percentage in the independent television industry of just 5% which is a lot lower than the BBC’s BAME employment rate at around 9%. Again, there’s no prejudice at work here - but there is a structural problem. The BAME people face additional difficulties in replicating career paths trodden so well by their white counterparts, and end up going from job to job.
While we need to battle for people from all diverse backgrounds to get jobs in the television industry, my producer friend is a good reminder that we also have to equally fight for them to get careers. The first step is to stop being naive to structural difficulties, and recongise that not all career paths are the same.
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