Title: Has ‘Diversity’ Lost Its Meaning? - The New York Times
Headings: Has ‘Diversity’ Lost Its Meaning?
Has ‘Diversity’ Lost Its Meaning?
Content: In this year's annual Pub­lishers Weekly survey of book-publishing employees, respondents — 89 percent of whom were white — found ‘‘no real change’’ in the racial composition of the work force since last year, despite ‘‘increased attention given to diversity.’’ The television and film industries are being investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over complaints of sex discrimination. And yet, as is the case in Silicon Valley, small victories are often overenthusiastically celebrated as evidence of larger change. In September, for example, when Viola Davis became the first African-American woman to win the Best Actress in a Drama Series Emmy, the moment was cheered in the press as a triumph of racial equity in Hollywood. But just a month before, Stacy L. Smith, a professor of communication at U.S.C. who, with other researchers, had just released a damning report that studied gender bias in 700 films made between 2007 and 2014, lamented ‘‘the dismal record of diversity, not just for one group, but for females, people of color and the L.G.B.T. community.’’ Why is there such a disparity between the progress that people in power claim they want to enact and what they actually end up doing about it? Part of the problem is that it doesn’t seem that anyone has settled on what diversity actually means. Is it a variety of types of people on the stages of awards shows and in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies? Is it raw numbers? Is it who is in a position of power to hire and fire and shape external and internal cultures?