It's not just the intern culture

though that certainly exacerbates the white, middle class nature of most creative industries. I know publishing quite well, for example. A more small-l-liberal, less bigoted bunch of people you'd be hard pressed to find. There are plenty of women in senior positions and plenty of openly LGBTQ senior execs too.

However, publishing attracts overwhelmingly white, middle-class women in its intakes. As you go higher up the payscales it becomes more male, but no less white.

Walk round the streets of London and one face in three that you see is not white. Walk into any publisher, music company, art gallery, theatre, opera house, orchestra pit and that ratio drops massively. I can't think of a single senior executive who isn't white in the big UK creative industries (and yes I know many of them).

Interestingly, the balance is shifting somewhat, driven by the more digital nature of modern publishing (for example). People with tech skills are typically male and much more often from non-white backgrounds, and that's what's driving the shift.

The real issue, as someone who's spent some time in the creative industries, is that we fail to make ourselves interesting enough to people in school. A clever kid doesn't immediately think of the creative industries as a fast-paced, teched-up place to work. So we get these Jacintas who all dream of That Job In Editorial which doesn't really exist any more and hasn't for at least a decade.

You could argue that publishers need to publish more books by people who aren't white, but the harsh truth is that publishers will publish what people want to buy. There are some very very good non-white London authors, for example; but the ratio is nowhere near that one in three I cited earlier. And if you look across at music, there's plenty of music with black heritage performed by black artists for a very diverse audience. Walk into any major record label - yes I've been to most of them - and most faces are white faces; so diverse output isn't the real solution, though I'd certainly promote it anyway.

It would be great if the creative industries could show some leadership. But what we see isn't that different from other sectors, sadly. How do we fix it? I don't know. But it's not as simplistic as some would suggest.

Posted By: Old Man on January 19th 2015 at 14:03:22

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