The Digiday Media Briefing presented a report detailing how media companies are dually delegating diversity and dissing people of color. That is, Black staffers are tasked with handling DE&I duties and not being compensated for the extra work involved. In short, employees of color are forced to play pseudo Chief Diversity Officers pro bono. How many White advertising agencies are doing likewise?
An executive in the Digiday story remarked, “I’m not a DE&I expert just because I’m Black. I don’t want that responsibility. It’s not my area of expertise, so I don’t want to be in that position, especially if I’m not getting compensated for it.”
When questioned about exclusivity in the advertising industry, Whites with hiring authority insist they can’t find qualified minorities. Yet for DE&I roles, they don’t hesitate to instantly green-light honorary promotions for unqualified staffers. It’s just a matter of time before the candidate pool expands to receptionists, security officers, janitorial maintenance crew and mailroom attendants.
(Also, why does Digiday always illustrate its Black History Month reports with Black power fists?)
The equity issue with media companies’ DE&I efforts
Media companies’ efforts to improve the level of diversity, equity and inclusion within their organizations have an equity issue of their own.
Black employees and employees of color already feel that they have to work harder than their white counterparts to receive the same level of pay and opportunities for promotions. But they are also being asked to be the ones working harder to close that equity gap and typically without receiving additional pay for their efforts and often with their only qualifications the color of their skin. “I’m not a DE&I expert just because I’m Black. I don’t want that responsibility. It’s not my area of expertise, so I don’t want to be in that position, especially if I’m not getting compensated for it,” said a current Vice employee.
The key hits:
• Black people and people of color working at media companies feel like they are being tasked with working on the companies’ DE&I efforts in addition to their main jobs.
• Media companies are not always compensating employees for the additional DE&I work.
• The equity issue around media companies’ DE&I efforts has led some employees to quit.
In light of the focus on racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd last May, media companies have paid a lot of lip service to DE&I, but they have been less forthcoming in financially supporting those efforts within their companies, according to current and former employees from companies including Hearst, Penske Media Corporation, ViacomCBS and Vice Media Group who spoke with Digiday on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “That’s the equity piece where they miss out. They want us to do this work, but they’re not paying us for it,” said the Vice employee.
Internal organizations for employees who are Black or people of color — commonly called employee resource groups or community groups — have been asked to take on new responsibilities related to companies’ DE&I initiatives. Some group members feel these additional responsibilities, such as providing diversity and inclusion reports to inform corporate-level DE&I efforts, go beyond the groups’ original mandate of creating a community within the company for employees who are Black or people of color to come together and support one another, such as by hosting events featuring speakers who are prominent Black people or people of color.
Once media companies began making their DE&I pledges following George Floyd’s killing, “they looked to us for everything: ‘Well, you guys are the Black group so tell us what to do or how can we be a part of what you’re doing,’” said a former Hearst employee who was a member of its Black ERG and left the company in late 2020.
Hearst-owned publications asked members of the company’s Black employee resource group to proofread articles for racial and cultural sensitives, but did not offer to pay for that work despite it being outside of the members’ job responsibilities and some members not being part of the editorial department.
“Here and there, it’s fine. But I can’t do your job for you. Hire Black editors,” the former Hearst employee said. A Hearst spokesperson declined to comment. On Feb. 3, Hearst released a company diversity report that revealed that, as of December, 73% of its full-time and part-time employees in the U.S. were white, 78% of employees at the manager level or higher were white and 64% of people hired over the previous 12 months were white.
Vice has compensated some members of its community groups for employees who are Black and people of color in light of the additional responsibilities, said the Vice employee. However, not all members have received additional payment or are comfortable with the additional DE&I duties. For example, the Vice employee took issue with Vice’s in-house agency Virtue, in January, asking some community group members for feedback on a DE&I training program that the agency is developing as part of a “DEI Charter” for its advertising clients. Specifically, Virtue asked for input on a DE&I vocabulary guide, an inclusive creative best practices document and a DE&I red flag language guide that it had adapted from Vice-owned publication Refinery29. The community group “turned into this thing where I felt that I was being asked to do much more on top of my work responsibilities,” said the Vice employee. A Vice spokesperson declined to comment.
Employees do feel that media companies have been following through on some of their pledges, including hosting diversity training courses for employees and hiring more Black people and people of color. The employees who spoke to Digiday said they appreciate the diversity training courses but that such education is for companies’ white employees. “They are great, but they are not for me — they are not for other Black people,” said a current Hearst employee. Meanwhile, the hires of Black people and people of color have been most apparent on the editorial side of the companies, including in leadership positions such as top editor roles at Refinery29 and Hearst-owned Harper’s Bazaar, according to the employees interviewed for this article.
Still, the employees who spoke to Digiday remain skeptical of whether these employees are being paid the same as their white peers. They also said that they feel Black people and people of color have also been disproportionately affected by the layoffs that many media companies underwent last year as the coronavirus crisis hurt their businesses and that they continue to see a majority of promotions go to white employees. “It’s about equity. That’s what I truly want to see,” said the current Hearst employee.
At Penske-owned The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, recent promotions mostly went to white employees, said a current THR employee. That is despite this person and other employees who are people of color asking for promotions, title changes and raises. A Penske spokesperson had not provided a comment as of this writing.
Further fueling employees’ skepticism has been a lack of adequate transparency into the levels of diversity and equity within media companies. THR employees, for example, have asked for the company to “release diversity statistics publicly like other media companies have done,” said the THR employee. “We were told that was going to happen, and it never happened. Not even an internal memo.”
Last year Vice hired an outside company to conduct a pay equity study so that the media company could adjust employees’ salaries. However, only a small percentage of VMG employees received salary adjustments, according to a current employee at Vice-owned Refinery29. “I’m more than positive that it was literally less than half a percent,” this person said.
A Vice spokesperson declined to comment, but a person familiar with the matter said the figure was 0.6% and that VMG had previously conducted a pay equity study in the fourth quarter of 2018 and that the low number of adjustments in 2020 could reflect the company having already meaningfully narrowed the equity gap.
Media companies not providing compensation for internal DE&I efforts sometimes contrasts with the payments they are making to support diversity, equity and inclusion outside of their organizations.
Take Hearst for example. The magazine publisher’s employee resource group for Black employees raised more than $200,000 last June to support organizations like Color for Change and the LGBTQ Freedom Fund. Hearst matched that money on a 2-to-1 basis and to bring the total money raised to $500,000, and the company donated an additional $250,000 apiece to the Equal Justice Initiative and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
However, Hearst has been less forthcoming in funding its employee resource groups. In 2019 Hearst had told members of its employee resource groups — which also include groups for Latinx employees and LGBTQ employees — that in 2020 those groups would receive a budget from the company to use for initiatives such as hosting events or designing merchandise. However, as of December 2020, “they did not follow through on that,” said the former Hearst employee. While Hearst did not provide budgets to the ERGs, the company did cover the costs of some events held by the ERGs in early 2020, according to a second Hearst employee.
Employees’ frustrations with media companies’ support for internal DE&I improvements has contributed to some Black people and people of color to quit because of companies failing to follow through on pledges. “Four people quit in my department since August for this specific reason,” said one former employee at a major news organization who was among those to leave.
— Tim Peterson, with contributed reporting from Sara Guaglione
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