The Adweek Blog Network’s SocialTimes published a report titled, “Pinterest Lays Out Plans for Better Workforce Diversity.” The plans include:
Implement a Rooney Rule-type requirement where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.
Meanwhile, the advertising industry is continuing its Mickey Rooney Rule, whereby every open leadership position goes to an Old White Guy—except for the more progressive White advertising agencies, where such roles go to White women.
2 comments:
http://fortune.com/2015/07/30/pinterest-diversity-initiative/
The only problem I see here with these charts, which will probably apply to ad agencies if they ever decide to Rooney Rule it (and I ain’t holding my breath) is that if you count 'Hispanic or Latin@' then that means any Spaniard or Brazilian on an HB Visa of some kind carries equal weight to an American Latino.
The ad agencies here already ARE so strapped for proof of diversity that they’re counting those Chief Creatives and Art Directors they’ve flown in from Barcelona and Madrid and Rio as diverse hires. They do it constantly. I mean I swear to god at least one of them is holding up a Brazilian female exec on the other side of the world as proof of their commitment to diversity and female equality IN AMERICA.
So how do you trust the ad agencies to show their numbers in the first place, when they’re already miscounting?
And how do you encourage them to hire American minorities rather than bumping their numbers by flying in even more white Spaniards and shouting 'DIVERSITY ACHIEVED!' ?
It's going to take an indie shop to sign up for this. No way any of teh holding company ones will do it because unless they release initial hiring numbers they have no way of tracking. And no way in hell one of the IPG / Omnicom / WPP etc agencies will do it because that opens them allllllll up to liability.
Where's Wieden+Kennedy when you really need them to step up to the plate? All that talk of diversity and bravery, Dan Wieden could be boldly going where no one has gone in 60 somethign years.
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