How To Turn Your Job Into A Career

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.

I Am Television's Invisible Man

“Hello! I’m right here!!”

“Can you hear me?! Can you see me?!”

“I know you saw me yesterday because we were having coffee together but today I’m invisible!”

I know too many professional black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people (BAME) who have shouted those words out loud at the radio and TV in frustration, or sometimes silently screamed it in their heads in work meetings.

Here is what normally prompts those shouts and make us wonder if we are invisible:

Well-meaning liberals who say they want to get rid of the glass-ceiling

Every couple of weeks there is a discussion around the glass ceiling that BAME people face in professional occupations. This discussion might be in the news or at a management meeting. One week the discussion will focus on the fact that of the 18,510 university professors in the UK only 85 of them are black. The following week on Newsnight you might hear a discussion on how only 5% of QC’s come from non-white backgrounds and the figure drops to 3% when you look at High Court judges. And then another week there will be a discussion on C4 News around the fact that just 10 people from ethnic minorities hold the top posts of chairman, chief executive or finance director of the top FTSE 100 companies – that’s 10 out of a possible 289 (3.5%).

Finally, working in television I often hear people discuss the low number of BAME people in senior level positions in the media. For example a few years ago only two of the seventy-four senior managers in BBC News were BAME, and the figures have not improved massively.

The reason we feel invisible as BAME professionals is not because nearly all of us in one way or another have hit a glass ceiling but because the discussion is normally between white people as they talk about how; “They really want to solve this problem and would love to have more black people at senior levels”. At which point if the discussion is in a news programme friends I’ve known are jumping up and down shouting at the TV; “What about me?” or “If you want to solve the problem promote me!”. Or if the discussion is at a work meeting they sit there in quiet disbelief wondering if anyone else can see the irony of the situation.

This week marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the great African American novelist Ralph Ellison who wrote the “Invisible Man”. In that book his black protagonists describes himself saying: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

I too have experienced my fair share of invisibility. I’ve been told I broke through one glass ceiling (from producer to series producer) due to a black Production Executive “seeing me”. There was a staffing meeting where senior management were lamenting that they didn’t have anyone to series produce their next documentary series. The meeting was taking place in a glass panel office as I worked just the other side of it. It was the Production Executive who suggested my name, to which I am told, everyone said “of course – he’d be great”. The rest they say is history. But up until that point despite the fact I was sitting in their eye-line I was invisible.

I believe this ‘invisibility’ has an incredibly damaging effect on black professionals, not only to their career progressions but to their confidence and mental health.

Every time a member of senior management professes to really want to break down the glass ceiling and then fails to promote staff from the diverse backgrounds it is even worse than if they hadn’t said anything. They are sending out a message that the BAME people who are around them, the BAME people that they know are just not good enough. Because the logic would be that if you really wanted to promote BAME staff you would simply do it unless there was something wrong with the BAME staff.

The contradiction between senior words and actions eats away at our confidence and eventually our wellbeing.

My experience however is that BAME staff are more than up to the task when we break through glass ceilings. But my experience is that sometimes like the character in Ralph Ellison’s seminal novel we are invisible.

In marking the 100^th anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s birth I would highly recommend reading the Invisible Man. Sadly its message is just as relevant today as when it was first published.

Secrets of TV Award Ceremonies

On Wednesday the 19th February I attended the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards. It is the annual festival to celebrate the best in TV news and current affairs. A place where BBC’s Panorama goes head to head with Channel 4’s Dispatches and the big news channels from CNN to Sky fight for bragging rights for the rest of the year. (For those who are interested it was a very good night for C4’s Dispatches, and the people at ITN went home very happy).

Looking around award ceremonies is an opportunity for a snap shot of not only what the make-up of an industry is but more importantly what the diversity of the leaders of that industry really looks like. By definition all the scrubbed up journalists, wearing their glad-rags and dining at the event were either senior management or programme makers at the forefront of British TV News and Current Affairs.

As I tucked into my filet of sea bass on a potato base something just didn’t add up.

We are often given statistics that the TV industry might be as much as 12% BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic), 5% disabled and even as much as 48% female but award ceremonies demonstrate that often these numbers don’t give us the full picture.

The first problem with the large headline figures is which grade people are at. Some broadcasters, like the BBC, split their diversity figures into grades to avoid the diversity stats being disproportionately represented by junior staff. However this can lead to a second problem.

In the large headline statistics non-editorial staff are always included. These are people who are not directly involved in the editorial content of programme making (HR staff, accountants, legal support). Some of these people can hold very important positions within a company/broadcaster and so will swell the diversity figures at senior levels. However these people have little influence on the subject matter of the programmes produced and what you and I see on our TV screens.

None of the broadcasters when they count their diversity figures distinguish between editorial and non-editorial staff. The suspicion has always been that the diversity for editorial staff is a lot lower than the headline figures for the total television workforce. We gets hints this may be the case when the BBC publishes the fact that their total BAME workforce rate is above 12% but those working in television is closer to 9%.

The 9% still includes the very important roles of production managers, talent managers, production executives and production coordinators who are not directly involved in editorial decisions.

For this reason the snap shot of the people I was dining with in their black ties and ball gowns at the RTS journalism awards is an rare opportunity to get a measure of what the important editorial decision makers look like.

In an incredibly non-scientific assessment of just walking around the award ceremony I estimated that of the several hundred journalists that that were there I could count the number of BAME people on less than ten fingers, the number of disabled people on less than one hand and women definitely did not make up 48%.

Of the people who won awards on the night Krishnan Guru-Murthy was part of the C4 News team that picked up the best News Programme of the year and my team won best current affairs programmes in the Nations & Regions (so at least one black executive producer went home happy). But the two of us were the rare exception and I didn’t see any gongs going to disabled journalists.

Six months ago Lenny Henry made headlines at the BAFTA’s award ceremony by asking where all the black people were. While I echo his sentiments I have a slightly more modest request:

Where are the statistics that accurately reflect the diversity in the television industry?

To Quota or Not To Quota

To quota or not to quota? That is the question.

In discussions about diversity in the media nothing can split a room quicker than mentioning the word “quota”. 

Here is a list of diversity words in order of acceptability: “Ambitions” “Goals”, “Targets”, “Ring-fenced”, “affirmative action” and then at the very top “quotas”.

For this very reason for the last five years or more, when I’ve been writing about diversity in the media, I have never mentioned “quotas”. I normally find it counter-productive and whether you support them or not they dominate the rest of the discussion.

The arguments against quotas are normally variations along the following three themes: 

1. That they are “reverse racism” or when talking about another kind of minority group some kind of generic “prejudice in reverse”. 

2. If you implement quotas you don’t appoint the best person but just someone because of their specific “diverse quality”. 

3. And finally the person from the diverse background doesn’t like quotas as they find them condescending and will never know if they were appointed because of their abilities or to tick a box.

These are all strong arguments against quotas and I can see merit in all of them. 

The arguments for quotas are simple and are normally twofold: 

1. There are more than enough qualified people from diverse backgrounds that finding someone competent to do the job will be easy.

2. Nothing much has changed in media diversity in the last ten years and despite “targets” and lip-service according to recent statistics things seem to getting worse. Quotas are the only way.

Again I can see a lot of merit in the quota side of the debate as well.

But I think the real differences between the pro and anti-quota brigades might just be the word. Drop the word “quota” and we might all be a lot closer than we think.

In the Observer paper on Sunday 9^th February Danny Cohen, the BBC Director of Television announced; “TV panel shows without women are unacceptable…We’re not going to have any more panel shows with no women on them. It’s not acceptable”.

From now on the BBC will not film any new all male comedy panel shows it is that simple. This comes after a recommendation by the BBC Trust last year. The BBC wants increased gender diversity in their comedy output and it will now happen. 

What is interesting for me is that everyone has fallen in line. I have not heard people moaning about it and 90% of the people I have spoken to think it’s a good idea.

What’s even more interesting to me is the complete absence of the word “quota” in the debate or in the announcement of the decision. 

Specifying that there will be a woman on every panel show could be viewed as a relatively crude quota. But even the people who are normally dyed-in-the-wool anti-quota advocates seem to have embraced Danny Cohen’s announcement. And the normal left leaning quota heroes just seem to be simply accepting it and not seeing it as a victory for quotas.

I think increasing diversity on the BBC’s panel shows is a tremendous move and I hope other channels follow the broadcaster’s example.

But what I think is even more important is the lesson that if you can take some of the rhetoric out of the debate and dial down the ideology it is surprising how many of us actually want the same thing: A more diverse television that reflects the real world we live in.

A Blue Print For TV Diversity?

A lot has been happening in the world of television diversity recently.

Two events seem to have spurred the media industry into action.

The first event was the publicatino of the Creative Skill Set Census late last year. I've written about the census before, which showed that while the UK media industry has grown by 5,000 people in the last three years the number of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people (BAME) working in the industry has fallen by 2,000. To put it another way; for every BAME person who lost their job over the last three years in the media two white people were employed!  

The second event has been the very public interventions by Lenny Henry on the lack of diversity in the television and film industry. What started as an off the cuff remark at the BAFTA's when he asked where all the black nominees where, seems to have turned into a one man campaign.

Both these things culminated in January with the Minister of Culture, Communications and Creative Industrie - Ed Vaizey - calling an industry wide "round table" of the great and the good to discuss what could be done.

Most of the talk was about more mentoring and training and increased monitoring. But into this mix of usual solutions Lenny Henry presented what quickly became known as the "Henry Paper". A brief two page document of a road map for structural change in the industry.

Whether you agree or disagree with the "Henry Paper" it was one of those moments that I feel any and everyone interested in increasing ethnic diversity in television should be aware of.

And so for your reading pleasure I present the paper:

THE HENRY PAPER

Increasing Ethnic Diversity Across The UK’s Media Output Based On The Success of Increasing Regional Diversity

OBJECTIVE

To learn the lessons from other diverse groups (most notably regional diversity) in the media as to how to achieve an increase in ethnic diversity.

BACKGROUND

The total number of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people working in television and across the media has decreased by over 2,000 people from 2009 - 2012 representing just  5.4% of the work force. We believe that a large part of this has been caused not by an increase in prejudice and racism but by structural changes in the media industry.

The decrease in BAME numbers correlates (with an expected time lag) with increased production moving out of London (London having the highest BAME numbers in the UK).

Not only do we applaud the recent developments to ensure the broadcast and media industry is more regionally diverse, (despite the effects it may have had on ethnic diversity), we believe they hold the key to increasing BAME diversity.

THE BBC’S SUCCESSFUL MODEL FOR INCREASING REGIONAL DIVERSITY

1.  Over the last ten years the television industry has been transformed with all major broadcasters successfully commissioning more productions from outside London.

2.  In 2003 the BBC decided to introduce a number of systematic changes and incentives in order to increasing regional diversity. It recognised that the industry was unfairly London biased, meaning that important stories, different views and opinions across the whole UK are missed - both behind the camera and on screen.

3.  In tackling the issue of regional diversity the BBC first had to define what constituted a “regional production”. It used three criteria - production spend, employee spend, and substantive base - and said that to be defined as a regional production any production would have to meet two out of these three criteria.

4.  The BBC then accepted the following four principles and resulting actions:

a.  As the entire population contribute to the BBC’s license fee the way the BBC spends the license fee should accurately reflect the percentage of the populations who pay it. For example if 9% of the license fee is raised in Scotland then 9% of the license fee should be spent in Scotland.  The BBC therefore decided to “ring-fence” money for spend in specific Nations & Regions for both the medium and long term to give both independent companies the confidence to set up in the respective regions in the knowledge that there will be a guaranteed income stream they can compete for and employees the confidence to plan their careers.

b.  The BBC augmented (a) by recognising that it has ambitions for growing the independent sector (freelancers, independent companies, etc) in order to deliver hiqh quality, innovative and value for money programmes. Thus it needed to not only ringfence spend on internal BBC productions, but also ringfence spend on regional production and regional independent companies. 

c.  Regional companies are often disadvantaged by commissioning processes taking place in London - both through weak informal relationships and logistical barriers. The BBC therefore decided to introduce regional commissioners with the task of identifying and being a point of contact for regional productions where the formal and informal links to London based commissioners may be weak.

d.  Last but not least, the BBC recognised that people and companies make long-term decisions when establishing themselves in regions or planning their careers. Thus, it would be ineffective to simply spread the commissions and types of programmes evenly and “randomly” across the board - as this might lead to short-term peaks and troughs in specific types of programmes (e.g. drama, current affairs, etc). Thus, they decided to create “Centers of Excellence” for specific genres to create a critical mass of expertise in each region.

THE PROPOSAL

1.  Transposing the BBC’s regional diversity model to BAME diversity across the industry would involve the following three steps:

a.  To define what constitutes a BAME production - i.e. Broadcasters should establish criteria as to how they will assess license fee BAME spend. This can easily be done with BAME criteria encompassing employee spend, production spend and substantive base (e.g. is the company majority controlled by BAME), with companies and in-house productions being allowed to self declare.

b.  To ringfence money - in both the medium and short-term for BAME independents and in-house employee spend. This would enable indie BAME companies to compete for commissions with confidence and employees to plan their careers.

c.  To introduce BAME commissioners - to actively seek out BAME ideas and address both the institutional barriers and informal processes that BAME employees and companies face when trying to get their ideas commissioned.

2.  Focus On Two Areas: Drama and Current Affairs. Finally, in order to demonstrate that this works, we would propose that the broadcasters begin by focusing on just two genres in increasing BAME representation: scripted drama/comedy and current affairs. Recent audience research suggests the largest divergence between BAME and white audiences in drama/comedy, and current affairs is possibly the most important genre for the needs and concerns of any population to be reflected and addressed. By concentrating our efforts this would also have the added bonus of creating a “critical mass” which is so vital in creating real change.

NOT JUST THE BBC

Although this paper has focused on the example of the BBC these initiatives must be industry wide - just as Channel 4 have also appointed Regional Commissioners and ensured that it commissions from non-London based indies.

To encourage this we could explore possible tax breaks for BAME productions or adapting the current Apprenticeship model to encourage employers to take on new employees.