A long long time ago in 2014 the advertising industry was nobly and publicly trying to increase its Diversity. Everyone was on board with the challenge, no one had agreed the details of the brief, everyone started work anyway. It was very important to the powers that be that our company was seen as “leading the way on Diversity”. As mentioned previously we were very proud of the way we on average paid women more than men for doing the same job which was awesome and a bit illegal but was enshrined in our creds presentation as evidence of being good at advertising.
An otherwise uneventful board meeting was brought to life with the news that the whole company would be having a “Diversity Week”. We’d had Radio Week when people who worked in radio came in for a week to talk about radio to a company that bought ads on the radio and that went well so we were going to do the same thing with Diversity. Questions arose.
Q “Does is sound like we don’t care about Diversity 51 weeks of the year?”
A “No”
Q “Have we agreed what we mean by Diversity (eg racial, gender, sexuality, socio-economic, disability)?”
A “No – The Diversity Board will do that”
Q “The what, who are they?”
(List of women produced and put on screen)
Q “Can you have a Diversity Board who are all women?”
(Humble narrator joins Diversity Board making mental note to ask fewer questions in meetings)
I attended my first Diversity Board meeting and was greeted with the warmth you’d expect from an older and more senior male entering a room that was 100% female discussing the patriarchy.
The idea being discussed was to give women time off during Diversity Week to highlight the gender pay gap. I pointed out that we paid women more so to stay true to the idea women would have to give up their lunch hour or come in at the weekend. If they didn’t like me walking in they fucking loved me now!
Skimming the meeting agenda it was clear that gender was the sole focus and we needed to diversify the diversity. A remarkable brainstorm ensued.
After deciding we would focus on racial, gender, sexuality, socio-economic and disability diversity someone suggested we broaden the circle (no pun intended) to include obesity.
“Absolutely not!” said a previously silent female holding her lunch (a single apple) in one hand and her thin privilege in the other. She looked hangry so we moved on. Evidently fat lives did not matter.
Another suggestion was that we make a commitment to hiring some ex-offenders to give them a gateway to re-enter society. A nice idea in principle but might fall down on execution (not literally as we don’t do that any more).
“That’s Brian our new head of HR who’s previous experience was shanking people on D-Wing -we call him Shawshank for bants”
We softened the ambition to people who didn’t have a degree but excluded murderers, which was better.
Over the next few weeks the plans for Diversity Week came together with some genuinely brilliant and transformative initiatives but there were a few bumps on the way which made me laugh so we’ll focus on those.
A Diversity Charter was written and was emblazoned on the wall in reception. The whole company would be told to sign it (literally on the wall), as would any new joiners. I asked what would happen if people didn’t want to sign it and was told that they would be made to go on diversity training and if that failed (actual word used) they had to leave. Not wishing to nit-pick but I was pretty sure you can’t fire people for disagreeing with you and or “failing” at the reconditioning process (even with Shawshank as HR Director). The Charter and Orwellian training stayed but the Luca Brasi signature attainment method was shelved.
The biggest bump was a well-intentioned support of people with disability via an empathetic staging of a Paralympic event for people without disability in the park opposite the office.
Yes really!
We were going to make up for the fact that we had no employees with disability and less than ideal office facilities for visitors with disability by getting people without disability to play a few games of wheelchair dodgeball and get Channel 4 to film it.
I’m usually a sucker for allowing potentially amusing mistakes to play out to reach their natural conclusion but this one needed intervention. I raised my concerns of the optics of all of this but seemed alone in my views. I tried to make a parallel to blacking up but the average age in our company was about 12 at the time so none of them were born when Little Britain was on.
They did accept that dodgeball was not a Paralympic sport and decided to switch to something that was but I was still getting nowhere with my warnings. I tried a compromise of empathetic sumo in fat suits but Hangry was having none of it.
I called in reinforcements (adult females) and deputised some colleagues onto the Diversity Board to rig the vote. They objected considerably more forcefully than I could/did and they were naturally listened to.
Sumo was a no no.
Diaries Of Media 