TV's dirty little diversity secret revealed by crew pictures

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!