When Statistics Hide The Truth

I recently had dinner with a friend who works on public health issues in the developing world. During the course of the meal the conversation ranged over a number of different subjects and I innocently asked her whether health rates were getting better or worse in Africa.

She’s known me almost all my life and gently told me that my question was a stupid one with the following response;

“Getting accurate statistics is almost impossible but even if you could often they don’t tell you the whole picture. Take a city like London, are Londoners healthier than they were twenty years ago? In some parts of the city the expected mortality rate is in the 80’s while in other neighbourhoods it’s lower than that of Malawi. Knowing the average mortality rate for a big city normally hides more than it reveals. If I’m going to improve a country’s health I don’t look at one big picture I look at loads of small pictures”

That warning against using big overall averages is one that I think anyone interested in diversity in television needs to listen to.

According to the big average official statistics when it comes to the number of black and ethnic minority people working in television things seem to be great, they might not be perfect, but the BBC and the broadcasting industry generally appear to be moving in the right direction and reflecting the diversity of broader society.

For instance, the percentage of the UK population that is BME is approximately 13%, while the percentage of the BBC that is BME is 10%. The percentage of the general broadcasting industry that is BME is 10.4%. Overall, it’s not perfect, but it’s also not too bad, particularly compared to other professions and industries.

The problem with the official statistics, however, is that they seem to fly in the face of my everyday reality. I constantly go to meetings where I am the only non-white person at the meeting. Recently I was at the Edinburgh Television Festival and, the festival’s participants were overwhelming white. The idea that 10% of the broadcasting industry are BME seemed fanciful in that context.

So how can these two facts possibly exist simultaneously?

A few years ago, a similar dilemma faced Professor Becky Pettit from the University of Washington. When she looked at official surveys conducted by the American government, African Americans seemed to be doing far better than the on the ground reality she was seeing. As she sets out in her new book, 'Invisible Men', her breakthrough came when she realised that many of the surveys excluded people in prisons. When the prison population was included the picture of how well African Americans are doing was dramatically altered, to be more in line with the reality she was experiencing.  That makes sense – African Americans are a whopping seven times more likely than the general population in the USA to be incarcerated.  The official statistics just didn’t reflect the reality of African Americans. (To use my dinning friend’s analogy it’s as if the neighbourhood with the worst health statistics had just been left off the official numbers)

So is there a simple accounting error that could be giving the wrong picture of how well BME people are doing in the television industry?  Would that explain why my day to day reality seems to be so different from the official statistics?

I suspect that there isn’t one big factor such as the one uncovered by Professor Pettit, but a number of different factors might, taken cumulatively, create a skewed picture.

Here’s one factor.  Different broadcasters define BME in different ways. For example, some broadcasters define BME as anyone who is not “white with a British passport”. This means white Europeans (including white Irish), white Americans and even white Australians and New Zealanders can be included in the official statistics.

A second factor might be that often freelancers and people working for independent television companies are excluded from the statistics. As the television industry increasingly becomes more reliant on freelancers and indies it is very hard to describe any of your statistics as definitive if you are excluding such a large number.

And last but not least, a third factor highlights my friend’s concern of using large average numbers. While the official statistics have now begun to make a distinction between different grades – a good move – there is often no distinction made between where someone works for a broadcaster. This means that production roles with editorial responsibility are effectively seen as exactly the same as jobs with no editorial responsibility.  And this could be one of the reasons why I am the only black person at production meetings. Many other BME people are employed in important positions but, often, they are not involved directly in editorial decision-making. Knowing the average number of BME people working at the BBC or ITV or C4 does little in telling me how well BME employment is in News and Current Affairs, Drama or any other genre.

Despite the big average statistics, my reality suggests that we could all do better when it comes to diversity.  What is your reality? Are the big average statistics hiding the more important smaller truths?

Is TV Driving Black People Mad?

A few months ago broadcaster, journalist, founder of Colourful Radio and generally all round good guy Henry Bonsu appeared on the Radio 4’s Current Affairs debate programme Any Questions, (for people who watch more television than listen to radio it’s the radio equivalent of BBC1’s Question Time). During the course of the programme one thing Henry said stuck in my mind; “unfulfilled ambitions are the biggest cause of mental illness for black people”.

If Henry’s point is true then it could have important consequences for BME people in general and those of us working in the media specifically.

First of all Black British people are vastly over-represented in the mental health statistics. For example black men are three times more likely to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals than the general population.

But what might this have to do with working in the media?

In the book “Status Anxiety” philosopher and author Alain de Botton argues that in most of Europe and the West we increasingly believe we live and work in a relatively fair democratic world. A world of “level playing fields”. The more we believe there is equality of opportunity then the more we believe our position in society is of our own making. When we succeed this is great but when we fail,(fail to get the pay rise we want, fail to get the promotion, etc), the more we blame ourselves. It is this perception of failure that creates, what Alain de Botton terms, “status anxiety”.

The gap between where we are in society and where we think we should be has also been recognised by the medical profession and is termed “Self-DiscrepancyTheory”. It is this gap that can seriously affect our mental health.

One only has to look at the statistics regarding employment diversity in the media to know that prejudice, direct and indirect, exists.

We may all know this in theory but in practice every time we apply for a job or go for an interview we suspend this knowledge and hope for the best, we have to temporarily believe the playing field is level (or at least level enough for us to be the successful candidate).

But every time we fail to get the job, which the statistics tell us is more likely to happen to us than our non-diverse colleagues the more likely we are to suffer from “Self-Discrepancy Theory”. Paradoxically this means that when we fail to get a job due to racism, the more overt the prejudice the better for our mental health. For example if a card carrying member of the KKK fails to give a black person a job the less likely he is to internalise the rejection, his mental health is less effected than if someone he believes to be fair fails to employ him.

That means according to “Self-Discrepancy Theory” prejudice in the media industry could be literally making people from diverse backgrounds mentally ill. Especially as this prejudice is nearly always indirect rather than direct and overt.

There are two obvious ways we could address mental illness caused by Self-Discrepancy Theory and the gap between where we are in our TV careers and where we think we should be. The first is to reduce the gap by lowering our expectations, the second is to eradicate all prejudice in the media industry. The first option definitely is not desirable, I do not want to lower our ambition, and as for the second option while we strive to eradicate prejudice this will not happen overnight.

But possibly there is a third option: We continue to aim high and overcome any prejudice. But when we’re unsuccessful at a job interview or fail to get the job promotion we know we deserve we offer support to each other. We remind each other of the statistics, the fact the deck is stacked against us, of the indirect prejudice that we often face. In that way we don’t internalise the rejection, we live to fight another day and most importantly we hang on to our mental health.

Am I Black Enough For You?

Where are you from?

I suspect every non-white person (and quite a few white people as well) will appreciate the complexity that such a seemingly simple question can pose. In those four words non-white people often have to work out what the person is really asking, and it’s hidden meaning can range from; “where do you currently live?” to “Were your forefathers part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and do you have roots in Africa?”

I was born in London, my mother is Jamaican and my father is British born to immigrant east European parents. I think of myself as a Londoner, even though I have lived in Scotland for almost five years and recently I was lovingly described as an “Afro-wegian” by a Scottish friend acknowledging both my black identity and the time I’ve spent in Glasgow. 

In an increasingly globalised, multicultural world questions of identity are complex and multifaceted. There are rarely any “right” or “wrong” answers when it comes to the question "where are you from?". The answers can change over time and sometimes they come down to fuzzy feelings of “belonging” and amorphous subjective qualities of values and tastes.

While the very fuzziness and multiple answers can work for an individual, and can even be liberating (I love the fact that sometimes I am British and other times I rejoice in my Jamaican heritage), fuzziness works less well when it comes to the television industry.

The question the British television industry often has to answer is; where does a TV programme come from? or more precisely; when is a programme made out of London? The BBC along with other broadcasters have quotas as to how many programmes they make outside of London. On the face of it that can seem pretty straight forward but like identity when can you say a programme is “Scottish” or “Welsh” or “Northern Irish” or just simply made outside of the M25?

For example what is the “identity” of a programme if it’s made by a company based in Scotland but the director and most of the team live in London and it’s filmed in Wales? To answer that question the TV industry has worked out three criteria to decide a programme’s “identity”: 

1. Where is the company based?

2. Where do the majority of the production team normally live, (“majority” is decided by share of salaries, otherwise you could just pack the team with cheap runners from a location)?

3. Where is the majority of the money spent (that means costs such as filming and editing)?

If at least two out of three of these criteria are outside the M25 then it is an “outside of London” programme. If at least two out of these three occur in a specific place, Scotland for example, then the programme is officially Scottish.

As someone who is interested in increasing diversity in the television industry I wonder if we should learn a lesson from how we currently decide if a production is officially an out of London programme.

Could we adapt the regional criteria to see if a programme is officially “diverse”:

1. Is the company (or executive producer) from a diverse background?

2. Are the majority of the production team from a diverse background?

3. Is the majority of the money spent with diverse suppliers (female camera operators, disabled editors for example)?

Regional programmes have to meet two out of three criteria, for diverse programmes maybe we would only have to meet one, or we might want to judge the diversity of programmes by different criteria.

Unlike the broadcasting industry’s approach to regionality I am not suggesting quotas but I am suggesting that we start monitoring. Are in-house production teams and independents becoming more or less diverse? How well are BME owned, or disabled owned, independent companies faring? Are we making more or less diverse programmes? It is only through monitoring that we will know if we are making progress and the first step in monitoring is working out what we are measuring.

I might be happy with a multi-hyphenated identity of being a mixed-race-afrowegian-londoner-living-in-Scotland but we might need to be a little less woolly when deciding if our programmes should be called “diverse” or not. As a Scottish executive producer I often go to meetings where we discuss whether a programme is officially “Scottish enough”, who knows in the future I might go to meetings to decide if a programme is “diverse enough”.

Do TV Executives Employ The Best People Or Their Best Friends?

Every TV executive I know loves to hear 5 magic words: “Your programme has been green-lit”. After weeks, months and on a few occasions even years of working away in the murky world of development you can become obsessed with those five words, you start hearing them in your sleep and think you can almost see them in cryptic messages  when you are reading a newspaper. For those of you who are less telly-savvy “green-lighting” is when the programme idea you have been pitching to a commissioner or channel controller is finally and officially commissioned.

Yet the  green-lighting comes with some unique problems. According to a new study by Professor Irena Grugulis of Durham University, the time immediately following a green-light is possibly when one of the biggest obstacles to increasing diversity in the media industry comes into play.

According to Prof. Grugulis, the time between a project being green-lit and when it has to go into production has decreased dramatically over the last twenty years. Previously there could be several months between a commission and needing to fully staff it, now that time has been reduced to an average of just two weeks. That means, to TV executives like myself, two weeks to find a director, assistant producer, researcher, runner and any other people that might be needed to bring the programme to our screens. Prof. Grugulis thinks that this pressure to staff up a project in a short period of time is having a devastating effect in BME and disabled people working in television.

I can see why.  When you have a month or more to staff up a project this gives you enough time to advertise for the positions and to hold proper interviews to fill them. When you have two weeks or less it is invariably a case of the TV exec or series producer picking up the phone and just calling their friends or getting word of mouth recommendations.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out how calling up friends to staff up a project will favour people who are from the same social circles as the person making those phone calls. If you are white and/or middleclass you are far more likely to have a social circle filled with white middleclass friends and all of a sudden the staff on your project will look extremely non-diverse.  Of course, it can go the other way too.  If you are black, disabled and/or from a working class background your social circle is likely to reflect that heritage or background. But the fact is that most TV execs at the moment come from white middle-class backgrounds.  The end result is not necessarily determined by racism or prejudice but it can be very problematic despite the best intentions of everyone involved.  Indeed, according to a report by the Government’s  Department for Business Innovation and Skills word of mouth recruitment “limits the number of applicants”, “it discriminates against those not aware of the vacancy” and “narrows the pool employers can chose from” and is “not very 'diversity friendly'”.

So what can we do to try and solve this problem? Here are my three suggestions:

 

The first thing we should do is raise awareness of the issue. I honestly do not think most commissioners are aware of the problem and the effect their actions are having on creating a non-diverse work force. Every commissioner I have spoken to seems genuinely surprised that green-lighting a project late in the day might have the unintended consequence of adversely affecting BME and disabled staff.

Second, we need increased awareness of (and more) online message boards like the TVCollective where job opportunities can be posted at short notice. The TVCollective and online message boards are not a substitute for a fair interview process but they do help alleviate the worst excesses of competent people not even being aware of job opportunities.

And third, we could ask broadcasters and large television companies to record how many positions they filled through advertisements and interviews. It is only by recording this that we can see if the problem is getting better or worse over time. How can we praise best practice unless we know it is actually happening?

So next time a programme maker is pitching their idea I’m sure they will still say a little prayer to hear those 5 magic words, but maybe we could also ask for a little more time before we have to staff it up. Who knows, commissioners might even like it as they will get the best people to work on their programmes rather than just the TV executive’s best friends.