There has been a “lack of real progress” in diversity in TV, according to the first five years of data collected for the Creative Diversity Network’s Diamond project.
The CDN’s report The Fifth Cut: Diamond at 5, which analyses more than 2.75m programme contributions in the five years since Diamond’s launch, found that “well-meaning initiatives” and “improvement in some areas” had yet to deliver meaningful change.
The shortcomings remain particularly acute for disabled people, who account for fewer than 6% of people in the most senior roles despite making up 18% of the UK population. The CDN also noted a drop in disabled directors, producer-directors and producers in the past three years.
Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people accounted for 12.9% of off-screen contributions in 2020-2021, up from 9.7% in Diamond’s first year, but CDN noted low representation in roles such as producer (10%), head of production (9.3%), executive producer (7.3%) and series producer (2.6%).
Black people remain underrepresented in roles such as director (1.5%), producer (1%) and executive producer (0.4%).
The contributions of people who identify as South Asian have declined over the period and remain underrepresented in roles such as director (1.3%) and executive producer (1.3%).
Men are still overrepresented among gay on- and off-screen contributors, while representation of all over-50s has remained static and below the national average in the period.
Diamond also found that women are much more likely to be in non-senior roles (56.1%) than senior ones (46.8%- down from 50.4% three years ago).
While the figures are derived from 41,000 forms and more than 850,000 in its latest sample, Diamond remains a broad snapshot of industry trends as it does not drill down into specific productions, teams or networks and it does not hold commissioners directly to account.
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