Our diversity data for June, 2021
A year ago today, we made a public pledge to share our US diversity data every June 18th. The sharing of this data is a way of holding ourselves to account, and of declaring a roadmap, publicly, for the kind of company we want to be.
Below are the results of a diversity survey that we shared with all staff members last week. This survey was anonymous, completely self-reported, and strictly voluntary. It excludes new hires who have yet to start with us, as well as leadership who are currently on parental leave. For those reasons, the final numbers shown below do not depict our staff in its totality, although they do give a sense of the progress we’ve made throughout the year.
As with many companies, the pandemic greatly slowed our ability to hire for the majority of the last twelve months. Since we shifted back into growth mode and began hiring again in February 2021, we’ve been able to attract some world class talent to Stink Studios. Their craft and commitment is making itself felt in our work and our culture every day.
However, while we’ve steadily increased representation and advancement of people of color across junior, middleweight, and senior levels, we have yet to fully redress the balance of representation at the director level and above.
Moving forward, we have two clear areas of focus.
Leadership. We have more work to do to deliver on our initial commitment of increasing Black representation at the leadership levels of our company to 12%, and to 14% across staff in general.
Culture. We are continuing to examine our cultural defaults in our work processes, professional growth and leadership opportunities, team interactions, and remuneration in order to create and uphold an equitable workplace for all.
OUR U.S. DIVERSITY DATA
These results represent the makeup of our New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco offices among survey respondents as of June 14th, 2021.
OUR GLOBAL DIVERSITY DATA
Starting this year, we’ve also decided to surface our global diversity results. These figures combine our US results above with those reported by participating staff in Buenos Aires, London, and Shanghai.
When our business, industry and world exists within a white dominant culture, there is no magic wand or single workshop that will create deep and lasting cultural change. Improving the makeup of our staff and leadership is part of the work, but we are also digging into our organizational culture and habits, partnering with businesses and causes that center the stories and experiences we need to see in the world, and investing in the future of diverse talent.
Here are some of the initiatives and programmes that we’ve participated in this year.
* We partnered with Project Inkblot, and used their Design for Diversity framework to understand where we are as individuals and as an organization in our racial equity work, our language, and cultural defaults;
* We joined forces with our sister company Stink Films and the students at the London Screen Academy to create and produce a pro-bono Filmmakers of Tomorrow campaign;
* We engaged Creative Equals for a strategic D&I workshop and asked [Challenge] consultancy to conduct unconscious bias training for our teams in London;
* We extended our US-based partnership with Scope of Work, a talent development agency for young BIPOC creatives, for a second consecutive term;
* We committed to an ongoing relationship with Create Jobs, an employability programme for young Londoners to help transform London’s creative workforce;
It’s not enough to build a diverse and equitable workplace that only exists for a moment in time. Our north star must be a foundational version of diversity and equity that is sustainable and self-generating. In order to achieve that goal, we must attack this problem from multiple angles. We must hire diverse leadership, we must create diverse leadership, we must identify and cultivate talent where the broader industry sees none, and we must do the work culturally and professionally to expose our staff to new opportunities, identify and eradicate bias, and create a safe space for diverse voices and experiences to flourish and grow.
We take our ongoing commitment to this work as seriously as the business itself, to the extent that something that we wrote as part of last year’s pledge has become an internal mantra:
Stink Studios should be a more equitable workplace that works towards a more equitable world or Stink Studios should not exist.
Thank you.
Originally published at stinkstudios.com on June 18, 2021.
