Let’s ditch the word diversity.. and choose fairness instead Sir Lenny Henry

A FEW weeks ago the BBC appointed a new chair, Richard Sharp, to oversee the corporation’s board.

I would like to share a secret with the new chair, if he is reading, and with Mirror readers today. I don’t like the word “diversity”. I know that sounds completely crazy because just the other day, a book I co-wrote with campaigner and academic Marcus Ryder was published called Access All Areas – A Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond. That’s right, even my latest book has the word “diversity” in the title.

But I really dislike the word, and here is why…

When it comes to the UK and the worlds of film, television and newspapers something is horribly wrong.

Despite women making up roughly half of all film students they make up only 13.6% of working film directors. According to the Reuters Institute, only about 0.2% of British journalists are black. And only 0.3% of the total film workforce are disabled.

And British media isn’t the only sector with a problem. Less than 1% of British politicians identify as disabled.

When it comes to the legal profession 71% of senior judges were privately educated despite only 7% of the public attending private school. In company boardrooms women are still massively underrepresented and in academia and universities less than 1% of professors are black.

FAIRNESS

Now most people don’t know these exact figures, and if I am honest it is my co-author who has these kinds of stats at his fingertips, but I doubt they are a surprise to anyone.

We experience their reality almost every day. We “feel” them. And that is why I don’t like the word “diversity”.

“Diversity” can often be too easily dismissed as “reverse racism” or giving women “special treatment” or trying to promote some kind of underrepresented “minority group”.

And before you know it it’s all “woke”.

Instead I want us to start using a far more basic word – “fairness”.

Looking at the figures I cited there is no way anyone can tell me that when it comes to the legal profession people who went to private school are 10 times better at law than a working class person who went to a comprehensive school.

I refuse to believe that men are somehow innately better at being company directors than women.

And if politicians are meant to represent British society how can we call it fair that only five are disabled when there are 13.9 million disabled people in the UK. These numbers reveal a basic unfairness.

The idea of fairness is thought by some scientists to be in our DNA and when you look at even the youngest children play they understand the idea of fairness.

And shock horror, fairer societies are better for everyone. There is a growing body of research that fairer countries are happier countries.

According to a paper by

Dr Salvatore Di Martino and Dr Isaac Prilleltensky in the Journal of Community Psychology the higher a country scores in what is called the “Social Justice Index” the higher the level of “national life satisfaction”.

And it is not just countries that benefit from fairness.

Companies see better profits when there is better representation. Companies whose workforce more accurately reflect the population they are based in consistently outperform less representative companies – see how I am trying to avoid the word “diversity” here?

The idea that “Fairness equals profits” especially holds true when better representation is found in the boardrooms where real decisions are made.

Here’s another fact for you: companies that actively go and recruit people from underrepresented groups such as ethnic minorities and women are 70% more likely to capture new markets and new customers.

Again none of this should be a surprise – we might not know all the studies – but we all feel it from firsthand experience.

Hands up who watched Bridgerton? The show took racial representation to a new level breathing fresh life into what we all think of as a Regency-era drama, and in the HIT MAKER US TV producer Shonda Rhimes process smashed Netflix viewership records to become the streamer’s biggest series with 82 million households watching it in its first four weeks of release.

Did I mention it was produced by a company with representation at its highest levels – it is owned by a black woman, Shonda Rhimes, who has a track record of creating multicultural smash hits in the US including Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal?

And Bridgerton is not just a one-off. The two other recent standout shows

or Netflix are ones that put represenation front and centre: The Queen’s Gambit, whose central character was female chess champion, and Lupin, French series about a black man rying to get justice for his dead father. I have to admit if someone had told me that Netflix’s biggest hits were

going to be a period drama, a chess tournament and a dubbed thriller I would have thought they had lost their minds. But that is what better, fairer representation can do for you!

And if it can do that for Netflix just imagine when the rest of society truly catches on to why we all need to champion fairness.

When I co authored the book, I used

THRILLING French crime drama Lupin the word “diversity” because I know it’s still the language we use when we talk about increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in all walks of society.

But I hope one day soon that we’ll start using the word “fairness”.

There are some very practical ideas in the book that anyone from the new BBC chair to “normal people” can use in their everyday lives to create a better, more equal society.

So let’s talk about “diversity” a little bit less and “fairness” a little bit more because that is something we can all understand and get behind. Wakanda forever!

Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for

TV and Beyond by

Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder is published by Faber &

Faber and priced £7.99.

FRESH TAKE Bridgerton was produced by radical US hitmaker who breathed new life into period drama WINNING MOVE The Queen’s Gambit