Climbing the Glass Ladder in the Broadcast Industry
Sadie Groom , Managing Director , Bubble Communications Founder of Rise - a Group for Women in Broadcast
Reprint Broadcast Beat Magazine , NAB NY 2017 Edition
First thing to say is men do not turn away from reading this piece – if you have a daughter , sister , 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 hectic 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 .
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 :
• 70 % of respondents said that their company ’ s working practices could be improved for women – main issues include career path progression , childcare provisions and flexible working
• Have you been subjected to comments or actions in your workplace that you would see as non-supportive of you being female ? Over half of the respondents said yes to this question , with some tales of not being taken seriously in meetings , to one male respondent saying he witnesses them being ‘ silently elbowed-out ’
• Number of females in the business . 69 % of respondents said that there were 25 % or less females in their business
• Females in senior management team . 15 % of respondents had half or more females in their
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