Role models: responsibility for diversity goes beyond DEI departments

Hiring diversity executives in Hollywood jumped after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement, but economic pressures since then have been blamed for several high-profile figures losing their jobs.

The exits in quick succession of Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) professionals at Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros Discovery and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences prompted headlines a year ago about ‘diversity fatigue’. The phrase itself is ambiguous. Some claim it signals a waning of the enthusiasm for hiring chief diversity officers as the issue dips beneath the front pages. On the other, the DEI execs themselves seemed to warn of burnout amid under-resourced departments.

Then in April this year, one of the industry’s best-known diversity executives, Miranda Wayland announced her departure from Amazon Prime Video amid a restructure of Amazon’s UK and European business.

This trend triggered a conference session at the Edinburgh TV Festival debating whether DEI departments should exist.

Read more Edinburgh TV Festival 2024: A challenge to the status quo

The poll of industry execs in the audience at Edinburgh was overwhelmingly positive that, yes, DEI departments had a vital role. That the issue was even being questioned may be provocative but did not come as a surprise to Wayland.

“I am perplexed by it personally,” she said. “I think when you look at various other roles in the industry, we don’t go up in arms when, for example, a head of finance has left. Nor do we question in DEI departments why people occupy roles for very long periods, and why there’s no fresh vision coming through. As a sector, we don’t often look at it from that perspective.

“Actually, it may be just that the time is right for that particular individual to move on in their career,” continued Wayland. “Perhaps some individuals don’t want to be pigeonholed into being ‘the DEI representative’ because they have plenty of other strings to their bow.”

While departures like Wayland’s make good headlines, she was keen to point to the stability of DEI executives and programs in the industry.

“People’s careers evolve. I think about my journey where I learned a lot from the BBC, including skillsets which I could then apply at Amazon. So if you look at people’s career trajectories it isn’t a case of sitting in an organisation until they drop down dead. It’s actually natural to use experiences in different jobs at different companies as a springboard to the next.”

The bigger question is whether those roles are being replaced or disappeared. Wayland said: “We should be asking if the institution is well equipped to continue the work. Because putting diversity on the sole head of responsibility for one individual does not work.

“You won’t have just one finance person controlling an organisation and expect them to run or change the entire infrastructure. Likewise, championing equity should not be the task of one person.

“We shouldn’t be putting the responsibility for that effort all on one individual. The question for me is not about the disappearance of any particular named talent but whether the company or institution is set up to independently carry forward something that we should all have ownership of.”

Wayland was formerly Head of Workforce and Creative Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC before moving to Amazon, where she played a significant role in the development of Prime Video Pathway, a £10m talent initiative, which is designed to open up access to jobs in the TV and film industry across the UK. She has also worked to help drive the pan-industry TV Access Project (TAP) and to establish Amazon’s collaboration with ITV, BBC, Sky and Fremantle to launch the TV Collectives Breakthrough leadership programme. There has not been a like-for-like replacement for Wayland’s position at Amazon.

Of her time at Amazon, she was diplomatic. “You will have to ask the organisation how committed they are. I hope Prime Video will continue to manifest some of the work I did when I was there and equally that they can see the value of a global diverse audience.”

Naomi Sesay, Head of Creative Diversity at Channel 4, suggested the function of DEI needed to change. “Surely we don’t want one specific department dedicated to DEI, we want all departments across the whole organisation to be on the same page. We also need to get people in the organisation to take account of the information [about diversity] put in front of them.”

Dhanny Joshi, Managing Director at Dreaming Whilst Black indie Big Deal Films said: “If there’s not diversity in the commissioning teams [at broadcasters and streamers], if they are all from the same background, they are not going to identify new voices. One day we won’t need DEI. One day it won’t be an afterthought. We are not there yet.”

Fatima Salaria, Executive Chair of The Edinburgh TV Festival and former Head of Specialist Factual at Channel 4, urged a change in the composition of UK TV’s most senior executives. “We need diversity of thought in our leadership, the people who are leading this industry, we need people who are different. We need people who are brave, we need working-class leaders. We need people from different races to absolutely be there in the room when these massive decisions are taken. We need diversity of thought because, at the moment, we have an elite that run this industry, and we absolutely have to change that.”

Creative Diversity Network report

Wayland didn’t leave it long to land another influential role. She now heads up the UK’s Creative Diversity Network (CDN), the body that runs the industry-backed Project Diamond diversity data collection project.

Analysis in its seventh annual report [Diamond: The Seventh Cut] paints a mixed picture of DEI in UK TV. While representation of Black, Asian, gay and other minority ethnic groups is deemed better than average when compared to other industries, other minority groups are at much lower levels than their national workforce equivalents.

The gender split overall is broadly even, however, in senior roles, women are far more likely to be in jobs such as heads of production and less visible in roles such as writers and directors, underpinning how the percentage of women in senior roles overall is continuing to fall.

Craft roles are often strikingly delineated. Some, such as sound and lighting are dominated by white men, with fewer than 8% of contributions to both made by individuals from an ethnic minority background. Fewer than 8% of contributions to lighting are made by women. Conversely, hair and make-up remain dominated by women (95.8% of contributions).

Contributions by disabled people and over-50s are showing year-on-year improvement but still fall below population and workforce estimates.

The organisation also expressed concern that the current downturn could “disproportionally impact workers from lower socio-economic backgrounds, disabled people and those from ethnic minorities.”

CDN has also announced plans to enhance the data it collects, including adding new ethnicity, religious affiliation and socio-economic background questions to the existing Diamond questionnaire forms.

Wayland says: “I’m pleased to be able to announce that going forward, we will expand the data Diamond collects by adding new questions on ethnicity, religious affiliation and socio-economic background. Looking forward we will also focus on highlighting evidence showing whether freelancers and others from lower socio-economic backgrounds, with disabilities or from ethnic minority groups are disproportionately impacted by the current economic downturn in the industry.”

CDN has also partnered with ScreenSkills to collaborate on areas such as data gathering and how CDN’s diversity monitoring and reporting tool can be used to help inform the training and development programmes that ScreenSkills commissions from training providers.

Wayland says: “We see a lot of synergies with ScreenSkills’ role and operations, particularly in areas such as training where both teams can draw on each other’s expertise and talents. Having its support and strategic advice through this partnership will be beneficial to achieving our objectives.”

Read more Inclusion begins in the writers’ room