Written by Zoe Liu, Associate Director (Cultural Insight) at Basis
When we set up our D&I committee last year, the first thing we did was to identify targets for what we, as an agency, needed to change. Back then, one of the priority areas was (and still is) ethnic diversity and inclusion. First, we wanted to understand more about the problem we were trying to solve and potential solutions; and the annual MRS D&I report gave us a starting point. In 2020, only 9% of ethnic minority people in our sector believed that everyone had the same opportunities regardless of race / ethnicity (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality in the Market Research Sector, 2020, MRS). While saddening, this number should come as no surprise when the 2019 edition of the report showed that of those earning £80k+, 86% were White British and only 4% ethnic minority (Where We Stand: Inclusion, Diversity and Equality Industry Report, Lightspeed).
We wanted to find out what was going on behind those numbers, so conducted twenty depths with people of colour across the industry – within Basis and at other agencies, at varying levels of seniority, across consumer and social research. We recruited participants via snowballing and via LinkedIn, with posts on our profile and on CORe’s. Naively, we hoped that these conversations would reveal ‘action points’, things that we could immediately put into practice to make Basis more inclusive.
What really happened, was that over the course of these twenty interviews, my mission became to give voice to the experiences of people of colour in insight. For me personally, the process of conducting these interviews has been emotional. On the one hand, it was validating to know I wasn’t alone in some of my own experiences as a POC; on the other hand, it was disheartening to be reminded of how normal it was for these things to happen.
It became clear to me that our industry as a whole needs to recognise that there is a problem in the first place: that all of the inequality and discrimination that occurs in wider society is very much present and insidious in our workplaces. That’s not to say that people of colour are suffering negative experiences every minute of every day: the people I spoke to enjoyed their work and had been successful in it. But it is fair to say that their experiences clearly show that our industry is far from truly inclusive.