In a world where DE&I is under attack, here’s what production can do to keep pushing
People & Culture
In this blog, Head of We Are Social Studios, Dan Keefe asks in a world where DE&I is under attack, how do we lash back at the backlash?
Cast your mind back to the beginning of June 2020. The UK was just starting to ease itself out of sudden lockdown. George Floyd had been murdered only a couple of weeks earlier. We were all reckoning with the past and speculating about the future. It’s easy to forget now, but for a moment it really felt like things would change, forever.
We had existential questions. Will we ever go back to polluting our streets now that we know what it’s like to breathe in clean air? Surely we’ll fund our NHS now that we’ve realised how much we rely on them. And there’s no way we could allow racial injustice to continue to go unchecked, intentionally or otherwise, in our workplaces or private lives. Is there?
It’s heartbreaking to revisit the optimistic and human-centric media and commercials from around that time. Amongst all the frustration, anxiety, conflict and guilt, there was an underlying feeling that the collective experience might galvanise us. Provoke us to organise our society more equitably, to change our priorities, to listen to marginalised people. Back in the present, that all feels naive.
If you were able to look ahead to the moment we find ourselves in now, you’d be alarmed. Things did change, just not in the way that we’d hoped. Instead of progression, we find ourselves in the middle of a backlash that’s recently been made into policy in the US. One that we’re not immune to here in the UK, where we work globally and find ourselves caught up in parallel culture wars. It’s overwhelming, and it’s hard not to let it sap your energy.
It remains to be seen how the corporate world will respond to attempts to reframe DE&I as ‘illegal discrimination’, but the message from the top is clear: stop trying to change the status quo, we want to keep the power exactly where it currently lies.
How do we lash back at the backlash? Focus on what you can control, and keep doing it. Even if it’s flawed, even if it’s problematic, even if it’s not working at all. In the same way that grassroots organising is the most impactful way to change wider society, everybody affecting whatever little piece of power or energy they own is what will, very gradually, make a difference.
At We Are Social Studios, we achieved the target of at least 50% of our directors and photographers being from an underrepresented background in 2024. It shouldn’t be hard, since that’s the majority of the UK population: everyone except straight, white, cis gender men. But in practice, it’s hard; directors and photographers disproportionately tend to be straight, white cis gender men.
There are problems. It’s time consuming. We have to tackle inconsistencies and nuances. It’s a challenge to collect the data in a way that’s accurate, anonymous and practical. There’s concern that – being a publicly stated goal in We Are Social’s Charter for Change – we will be opened up to criticism if we fail.
But the point is less about hitting a specific number. Having a goal of any kind sets the intention, causes us to be accountable and keep having those discussions. This keeps diversity on the agenda and forces conscious attention, no matter how busy we get.
It’s the reason why our work now benefits from a more diverse range of perspectives, our crews are more inclusive and we have an engaged and unified team culture. It’s helped us set new minimum standards, made us accountable and forced us to invest in training and seek different perspectives. Where we’ve made improvements, it’s given us incentive to explore new areas. This year we’ve got an additional target of one in three DOPs/videographers being from underrepresented backgrounds and upskilling on accessibility, disability and neurodivergence in production.
So whatever your particular version of this, just keep doing it. If you’re not doing anything yet, start doing something. If it’s not working, change it. If you stopped, just start again and don’t waste a moment judging yourself. Then maybe, in another five years’ time, we’ll look back at this era as the dawning of the age of enlightenment that we’d hoped for back in 2020. Or at the very least, we’ll be slightly better at producing content.
