‘You’re fixing a number, not changing the culture’: Confessions of a media exec on diversity quotas

By Jessica Davies

Widespread media coverage of social injustice over the last year or so has cast an uncomfortable albeit much-needed spotlight on businesses’ need to improve diversity rates — fast. But some worry that pressure is leading to strategies that improve optics, but skirt actual changes needed to sustain inclusivity in workplace culture.

For the latest in our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we spoke to a senior media executive with experience of running DEI taskforces, who worries that the box-ticking approach — though not without merit — is a strategy that keeps tokenism alive and well and doesn’t quash unconscious bias.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What frustrates you most about the way companies are trying to tackle low diversity rates?
My biggest concern is that it’s seen as a short-term problem that can be fixed by numbers. A lot of companies are doing reports and actively promoting the results to say they’ve increased the number of females they’re employing or the number of senior people of a different race — but that doesn’t fix the problem: you’re fixing a number, but you’re not changing the culture. And by not changing the culture, it just creates a whole spiral of problems. When you focus on quotas, you’re building more inequalities elsewhere.

Talk me through the consequences of that approach.
One is positive discrimination. I’ve witnessed it where companies haven’t chosen the best candidate who happened to be a white male, because they’re trying to meet a quota. And that’s a problem — the appearing to change as opposed to wanting to and believing in change. When you’re hiring people based on color or gender, not based on their experience, particularly in senior roles, you’re setting them up to fail. And by setting them up to fail, it gives employers the excuse to say ‘well we tried it as a test, and it didn’t work, so we’re going to go back to our previous way’, as opposed to actually creating meaningful change. And it’s why tokenism remains.

What’s a better way to approach it?
It has to be from the ground up. It shouldn’t be just a hire-from-the-top approach, where you bring someone of a different profile in — you need to do both so you’re building a fair base, but focus at the bottom and ensure that [inclusion] mentality translates through the business. Many businesses are tackling it like it’s something they can fix at once, but it’s going to take a generation if not longer. HR also needs to be more accountable. More thought should go toward how we develop people and how we change our processes and recruit people more fairly at entry-level. For instance, does it really matter that someone’s had a [college] degree, particularly in media? Probably not. We should look much more at things like people’s capacity to learn, their hunger to be in the industry, their team-building skills. The rest we can train them in. It shouldn’t …read more

Source:: Digiday