Covid’s wall of faces and what it says about business

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was early April and, like most of America, I had only begun doing regular video conferencing calls for a few weeks. It was an all-new world and you had to adapt quickly. What I hoped would only be a few weeks of working from home was quickly becoming a more permanent life change than any of us had realized.

As part of my job, I began attending community and industry webinars that allowed like-minded professionals to come together, share notes, and talk about what we were doing. One of the few positives from the stay-at-home orders is that we’ve learned how distance doesn’t have to be a barrier. Professionals may have gathered only once a year at a conference, but now we could meet weekly to exchange ideas. It was on these calls I saw the pattern. From the grid-wall on my computer screen, there were usually only two or three faces of color out of thirty, forty or more — each and every time.

My career has been in the entertainment, advertising, arts/culture sectors and diversity, at the senior level, has always been an issue. Thankfully, women have usually been well represented at every job I have held and at every management level. But looking back, there have been fewer times than fingers on one hand where my client has been a person of color.

I am in the minority in my industry. This is, of course, not the first time I have noticed this. And when, in large industry meetings, a pattern emerges, those attendees of color usually represent theater companies, art institutions and TV networks where the color of our skin was inherently tied to the programming of the company they represented.

I’ve long felt that without diversity at the senior levels, there’s no one to inherently bring minority perspectives to the attention of those who make the final decisions. I also realize that diversity is not something that, on a senior level, can be turned on with a switch. Each company needs skilled leaders and those skills need time and opportunity to be learned. It is encouraging to hear about new programs that are making internship opportunities available to people of color. But this is feeding diversity in at the bottom level and without a fundamental change throughout, these workers may never make it to the board room. We need companies to constantly work at providing opportunities. And it is work to constantly re-evaluate and look yourself.

I hope that companies, big and small, will show young people of color, through action and placement of staff, that there is a future for them in our workplaces. And when they are on video calls, or whatever the equivalent will be, what they see is a grid of faces that represents how diverse we really are.