Broadcast Beat Magazine 2017 NAB Show NY/SMPTE Special Edition | Page 16

CLIMBING THE GLASS
LADDER IN THE
BROADCAST INDUSTRY
By SADIE GROOM,
MANAGING DIRECTOR, BUBBLE COMMUNICATIONS
FOUNDER OF RISE - A GROUP FOR WOMEN IN BROADCAST
First thing to say is men do not turn away from
reading this piece – if you have a daughter, sis-
ter, niece you might want to know this…In 1996
I joined the broadcast industry – at this point
bright eyed and slightly bleary tailed after a hec-
tic first NAB we all joked about how few women
there were in our sector and how we didn’t have
to queue to use the bathrooms! So, 21 years later
what has changed? Are there still fewer women
than men in the industry from a user and business
perspective? Are all the CEO’s still men? What
other levels of diversity are there in our sector?
These are questions that I have been looking at
for three years now and have finally started to do
something about it and in particular the issue of
female diversity.
I should stress why I think that this is important.
Firstly, all those very bright people at McKinsey
and the World Economic Forum have done the
statistics and proven that boards with a diverse
range of people perform significantly better.
Secondly as the broadcast sector moves closer
into an IT centric world we want the sector to be
attractive to younger females and they need role
models to do this. Thirdly women are 50% of the
population and therefore are consuming 50% of
what is broadcast (in whatever way we broadcast
today) and therefore they are buyers on all levels.
16 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
So, what happened next? I realised that to
approach the industry associations and tell the
story I needed some statistics – just to note that
the survey was focussed on women in non-craft
roles in the broadcast sector – operations, sales,
marketing, engineering and business. The survey
that I ran, which had just over 100 respondents
(male and female), looked at the number of
women in the sector and if they wanted to join a
group to support them and if so what would the
group look like. The statistics first: