The BBC Announces their New Global Diversity Strategy

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has announced their diversity strategy for the next four years to come. The new strategy extends to all groups presented in society and its main aim is to develop the organisation to mirror that of its consumers, which entails creating more diversity in its workforce and in its programming. The broadcasting giant has stated that it feels such steps will help meet its viewers’ needs and create more successful programmes. This statement reflects the strong business rationale the media corporation emphasises in its Diversity work.

The BBC’s workforce diversity is closely tied to the diversity of its programming and the representation of different societal groups. The publicly funded broadcasting company has the responsibility to serve its diverse audience and to provide distinctive programming. This latter objective can be effectives achieved by having a diverse workforce for content creation. Apart from these reasons, the Equality Act 2010 requires public companies in the UK to end unlawful discrimination based on various grounds including age, gender, race, disability, pregnancy, maternity and gender reassignment. The BBC developed its current Diversity strategy through external and internal surveys, research and census, as well as quantitative and qualitative methods that have yielded information that help the organisation align its workforce and programming strategy to better reflect its audience. As part of the research, the Cultural Diversity Network, a UK partnership of main UK broadcasters and industry companies aimed at creating greater diversity within the companies and their on-screen content, found that men occupy twice as much screen time as women and that the discrepancy between disabled people on television and real life is 1-to-20. The same analysis showed that there are 10 times as many homosexual or bisexual audience members than there are present on screen. This figure, however, is biased by the relatively large number of gay characters, which is disproportionally higher than the number of lesbian or bisexual characters. Two analysis by European Diversity Research & Consulting had delivered very similar results of gender, ethnic, generational and sexual diversity for both the German TV and magazine advertising markets.

The BBC’s newly set objectives for 2015 require the Corporation to create greater diversity in its workforce from top to bottom and to deliver high quality, diverse programming. Hence, the company also intends to introduce a system that would make diversity part of their departments’ various day-to-day operations. Departments have to individually introduce rolling one year Diversity Action Plans that help meet the BBC’s overall goals of diversity. Additionally, the BBC plans to move part of its production out of London, place greater emphasis on audience research, and deploy targeted training of staff. Also, BBC Access has been created, a body within the BBC solely tasked with providing accessibility for disabled staff and audience members.