Is the media and advertising industry better than the Yorkshire Cricket Club when it comes to diversity and creating a sense of belonging?
Azeem Rafiq’s heartbreaking testimony before a parliamentary committee last month presented the sport of cricket with its day of reckoning.
There’s no turning back now – cricket is in a tailspin it seems, but could this scandal usher in a new dawn for the rest of us too? And the media industry? Does he have the same skeletons in his closet?
In 1968, county cricket welcomed the world’s greatest players through its doors by relaxing residential qualifying rules.
Alongside the great Sir Garfield Sobers came the cream of world cricket, and these great player associations began long associations with their adoptive counties.
However, Yorkshire Cricket Club chose to deliberately put themselves at a disadvantage by insisting that all of their players must be born in the county, otherwise known as “God’s Country”.
They dropped this birth qualification rule in 1992 when they signed Indian “maestro” Sachin Tendulkar.
So looking back I start to wonder if this anti-diversity mindset has contributed to the current mess they find themselves in?
While the media industry certainly did not ban foreign employees in the 1970s and 1980s, not much thought was given to diversifying the workforce.
Recruitment bonuses were the norm in the industry, and many companies encouraged employees to nominate friends and family for positions to reduce recruitment costs and employ people who would fit in and look like “us”.
The Advertising Association published the Everything in the census in June this year. The lived experience of people from black backgrounds made reading painful but unsurprising given the global attention given to Black Lives Matter over the past 12 months.
The census also highlighted that the Asian experience in the UK advertising industry was less than ideal. I think these findings surprised the industry because we have a number of Asian people in leadership positions, but it’s not enough.
The results were truly shocking, with 15% of Asians experiencing discrimination and 27% likely to leave the industry due to a lack of inclusion. Muslim employees are 32% likely to leave the industry and 16% believe they have been discriminated against because of their religious beliefs, compared to an industry average of 1%.
The number of Hindus (27%) and Sikhs (23%) looking to leave the industry is dismal.
What is even more shocking is that Islamophobia seems to be prevalent in our industry.
People of Pakistani (41%) and Bangladeshi (35%) descent are significantly more likely to feel excluded at work, whether engaging in professional or social activities, compared to 22% of white employees.
Asians as a whole are twice as likely to be excluded from events or activities in the past 12 months.
With Azeem Rafiq making it clear that he wouldn’t want his own children playing cricket, it’s easy to see how cricket could pass by a whole generation of players of color.
And be warned – this is what could happen to our own industry if we don’t act now and truly commit to change.
The lack of diversity at Yorkshire Cricket Club has created a culture that has backfired and had a major financial impact on the club as sponsors have severed ties and valuable international cricket revenue is on the verge of disappearing as the club was suspended as a home ground. by the ECB.
Maybe one day advertisers will ask companies in our industry to share the experiences of ethnic minority people in their organizations and move money towards or away from them accordingly?
Anyway, we have to do the job. We have only scratched the surface.
Naren Patel is the founder of Media For All
