The chairman of Channel 4 has taken a swipe at the lack of diversity of the latest appointments to its board. The appointees, who join the board for a three-year term, were announced by Ofcom and approved by Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary. In a leaked memo to staff, Sir Ian Cheshire hit out at the appointments of four new white non-executive directors which he claimed lagged behind the broadcaster’s own diversity targets. ‘These appointments will improve representation on the board but do not yet meet the levels of representation throughout the organisation’, opined Cheshire. Following the latest round of appointments, 14 of the 15 members of Channel 4’s board are white: that falls well below the broadcaster’s overall target to draw 20 per cent of its staff from ethnic minorities. Perhaps Cheshire, a middle-aged white man, should do the decent thing and stand down himself, as a way of improving the diversity numbers?
Who then are the non-executive directors at the centre of this row? They include the Boots chief executive, Sebastian James, and the Warner Records UK managing director, Alex Burford – both are guilty of the crime of being white men – which means they score zero or even less in the corporate diversity stakes. The new appointments also include two women: Dame Annette King, an advertising industry executive, and Debbie Wosskow, an entrepreneur. One might have thought that appointing two women to the board – out of an overall total of five – might be something to applaud in terms of ‘diversity progress’ but that would be naive. Women, it seems, don’t count in this particular race, unless they are from an ethnic minority.
It is a closed shop of the privileged, self-promoting and successful
We can safely assume that the Channel 4 chairman is at least happy to give a thumbs up to the only non-white new board member, Tom Adeyoola, a tech entrepreneur. Adeyoola said on LinkedIn that he ‘couldn’t be more excited to be joining the board of Channel 4’, adding: ‘As the child of immigrants growing up in London, Channel 4 always spoke to be as a place of possibility, purpose and provocation.’ Each to their own, I suppose. He was educated at the exclusive St Paul’s School in London and the University of Cambridge. Is that really wildly different to the background of his fellow board newbie, Sebastian James, who was educated at Eton and Oxford? Where exactly is the diversity? It might be more pertinent to ask what either offer much in terms of experienced and background when it comes to addressing the huge challenges facing broadcasters in the new world of digital and streaming?
That is to some extent the nub of the problem in many of these overheated arguments about diversity in corporate boardrooms. It is a closed shop of the privileged, self-promoting and successful, moving from one boardroom to the next. Collectively speaking, if amounts to the narcissism of small differences: most of the candidates, of whatever colour or ethnicity, are invariably people from the same backgrounds, educated at the same elite universities, mixing in broadly the same social circles. It suits this self-selecting group to be perpetually engaged in an essentially meaningless row over who adds ‘diversity’ to which boards, while all are perhaps guilty of sharing one common goal – which is to keep anyone who is genuinely different, in terms of class or background, and of whatever colour, as far away from the gravy train as possible.
Meanwhile, in the real world – while the Channel 4 board agonises over its alleged diversity failings – its 1,200 strong workforce has been told to expect big job cuts. It follows a slump in TV advertising that has hit broadcasters hard. The channel has been busy taking an axe to programming in an attempt to reduce spending. Most of the job cuts are expected to fall on staff based at its London headquarters, and anger has been mounting over the big pay packets of the channel’s senior management team. The chief executive, Alex Mahon, earns a salary of around £1.5 million, the most a boss has been paid in the channel’s 40-year history. Ian Katz, its chief content officer, collected £845,000 in pay last year, another record sum for that post. The combination of job cuts for the workers and bloated salaries at the top hardly make for a happy workplace. One senses that the diversity of Channel 4’s boardroom is the least of its problems.
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