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Despite a seeming increase in on-screen female representation in the TV realm — I May Destroy You, Fleabag and Bad Sisters, to name just a few — a new report has found that the proportion of women in senior roles in the TV industry has fallen sharply since the pandemic.
According to Diamond, a system used to monitor diversity across the British TV industry, the proportion of women in senior roles has fallen sharply since the pandemic, dropping every year for the past four years to hit 45.4% in 2022.
The most significant decrease in female representation came during the first year of the pandemic in 2020, while male representation remained stable. The Creative Diversity Network (CDN), the organisation responsible for the Diamond report, suggested that this was because men were less likely to have left the workforce during the pandemic.
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The study also found that the proportion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people in senior roles though has risen incrementally from 11.4% in 2022 to 12.2% in 2023, while the representation of disabled people in senior roles remained low at 4.7%.
'The systemic inequality across the sector and society means that progress is taking more time than any of us would like,' Paul Moore, the Chair of the Creative Diversity Network, says. 'Alongside efforts to improve representation through hiring and casting, retention of underrepresented talent must remain an industry-wide priority given the current skills shortage.'
The report also noted that off-screen queer representation in the TV industry is ‘strong, compared to population estimates,’ with the proportion of contributions made by people who identify as transgender has increased in each of the last three years.
Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
