Media Briefing: Media companies’ diversity reports show compounding leadership gap problem

By Tim Peterson

The Media Briefing this week looks at why it is so urgent for media companies to address the lack of diversity within their leadership and management ranks.

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The problem with media companies’ lack of diversity in leadership positions

Over the past month, Hearst, The New York Times and Vice Media Group have released diversity reports that break down the demographics of their employee bases, including the people in leadership positions and the people they have hired in the past year. Taken together, the reports show that, while companies are improving the racial and ethnic makeups of their organizations, there is a lot of work left to be done.

VMG’s report showed that the publisher once notorious for being a boys’ club now employs more women than men and that the majority of new hires in the U.S. last year were people who are Black, Indigenous or people of color. However, 58% of Vice’s employees in the U.S. and 67% of the company’s executives worldwide were white. “I’m not impressed,” a current Vice employee said after VMG published its diversity report on Feb. 4.

Diversity reports from Hearst and The New York Times painted a worse picture than VMG’s. At both media companies, a majority of the overall employee bases, people in leadership or management positions and the people hired in 2020 were white. At Hearst, 73% of employees overall, 78% of employees in management positions or higher and 64% of new hires were white. At the Times, 63% of employees overall, 74% of employees in leadership positions and 52% of new hires were white.

Media companies’ diversity shortcomings pervade their organizations, but lack of diversity among their executive and management ranks is particularly problematic. Employees see the racial and ethnic makeup of the people in those roles as an indication of their own growth opportunities. If they see an absence of people who look like them in those positions, they see themselves as unlikely to be promoted into those positions at a company and that they should look for employment elsewhere. The Times underscored the issue in its diversity report. “Black colleagues who are not in leadership positions leave the company at a higher rate than white colleagues,” the Times stated in its report. A Times spokesperson declined to make an executive available for an interview.

After VMG’s chief people officer Daisy Auger-Domínguez joined the company in May, she and VMG CEO Nancy Dubuc conducted a listening tour to talk with employees across the company as part of an effort to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at VMG. “What we discovered was the primary pain point for folks was lack of transparency and clarity over what it took to move from one level to the other and your biggest pain point in …read more

Source:: Digiday