Pictures of television production crews
are trending on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, most with the hashtag #DiversityFail.
I am sure most people have seen the type
of photographs I am talking about. A successful production has come to an end
and one of the crew members has decided to gather everyone who has worked on
the production and take a picture of their happy smiling faces. Then they post
the picture on social media for the world to see.
Invariably, despite the official stats
that the BBC has 15% BAME workforce diversity or Channel 4 has over 20% BAME
workforce diversity, the pictures expose the real diversity of the people
actually making the programmes. BAME and people with a visible disability are
thin on the ground to put it politely.
The former CEO of the Royal Television
Society, Simon Albury, has a habit of collecting these pictures and posting one
every couple of months on social media to expose what diversity behind the
camera looks like in the UK despite official statistics.
IGNORING THE EVIDENCE
If I am truthful I usually look at these
pictures and simply ignore them.
First, I know from first hand experience
what diversity behind the camera looks like.
Second, I am always wary of highlighting
anecdotal evidence that might support someone's argument. Any single picture is
literally, (and metaphorically), just a snapshot and so might not be
representative of the industry as a whole. I was trained as an economist, I
hate unscientific skewed data.
But on Monday, something different
happened...
THE POWER OF PICTURES.
TV veteran Shibbir
Ahmed asked Simon to post all the pictures he’d collected over the last few
months in one Twitter thread. The result is devastating and packs a
psychological and emotional punch that takes the wind out of almost any
disabled and/or Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people working in television.
The pictures seen together are also deeply demoralising for anyone actively
working to increase diversity in the media.
Taken together it is impossible to dismiss
them as “one-offs” or not representative of the industry as a whole, especially
in the absence of any crew photographs that show high levels of BAME and
disabled diversity.
The pictures are upsetting not just
because they vividly illustrate the uphill struggle facing non-white and
non-abled bodied people working in the industry.
They are upsetting because it can feel as
if the pictures are incredibly insensitive. It feels as if the pictures are
almost celebrating our exclusion. No one featured in the pictures seems to have
any empathy as to how these pictures will be received by all the types of
people not featured in them.
Far from being embarrassed or ashamed
about the employment practices that these pictures seem to reveal the
participants seem to want to rub salt in the very real wounds of diversity work
exclusion.
However, I personally know some of the
people featured a few of the pictures and I refuse to believe that they could
be so hurtful and uncaring around issues of diversity.
As always science might provide the issue.
ACADEMIC STUDIES
Research by New York University’s Felix
Danbold and UCLA Anderson’s Miguel Unzueta, published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes studied how different groups perceive diversity differently.
They looked at seven
different studies which showed that depending on your social standing in
wider society and your place in an organisation you literally looked at these
types of pictures and perceived a group’s diversity differently.
In one experiment, people were shown
pictures and asked to judge if the picture was “diverse”. People from
marginalised racial groups felt a group was not “diverse” until the number of
non-white people reached a certain percentage. This percentage was considerably
lower for white people to perceive a group to be “diverse”. Interestingly this
was not just about self-interest with regards to the non-white participants.
The BAME participants had the same view with regards to the diversity of a
picture irrespective of whether their specific racial group was featured in the
picture.
In another
experiment, researchers showed that different groups placed a
different level of importance on where diversity was in an organisation. For
example when talking about diversity at Facebook under-represented groups are
more likely to want a higher representation in technical and leadership roles before
declaring “victory”, compared to dominant groups.
The other interesting point to consider is
that many of the #DiversityFail pictures that Simon Albury posts actually have
relatively high levels of gender diversity. Other people have suggested that people
may have difficulty thinking of more than one type of diversity at a time. So seeing that a team is
diverse along gender lines can make people not consider other types of
diversity.
So what does all this mean?
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
First of all, the #DiversityFail pictures
reveal that we are still a very long way to go when it comes to increasing
diversity behind the camera. A lot further than official statistics may have us
believe.
Secondly, it might have important policy
implications. The BBC executive committee for example currently only has one
non-white member, Gautam Rangarajan, and as far as I am aware no visibly disabled
members. At the same time, 41% of the committee are women. The committee is
ultimately the group that decides if the corporation is achieving its diversity
targets and what those targets should be.
The research clearly demonstrates that
whether a diversity policy is judged a “success” or “failure” will depend on
the make up of the group assessing it. This points to the urgent need to
increase the overall diversity at the top levels of all the broadcasters, not
just the BBC, if executive committees’ views are going to chime with the
perceptions of the more diverse population as a whole.
One last point, I must commend the work of
people like Simon Albury and Shibbir Ahmed because without these #DiversityFail
pictures many of us would be none the wiser of what the diversity behind the
camera really looks like. I just hope that the correct policies are implemented
by the broadcasters soon, so we can start using the hashtag #DiversityWin!
