It’s Time to Embrace Economic Diversity for Better Diversity of Thought (a personal view)

The ‘Elitist Britain’ report 2019 by The Sutton Trust and Social Mobility highlighted the increasing influence of the ‘elite’ on British society. Its benchmark is the proportion of privately educated people in positions of power: it found that 65% of judges, 43% of ‘news media’ and 34% of PR CEOs were privately educated, compared to just 7% of the population.

I fear that we, the creative advertising, communications and marketing industries are no better. In fact, we do quite a lot to make it hard for people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to embark on a career with us.

We still have offices in the centres of big cities like London and Manchester, or in their affluent suburbs, making access difficult due to the high the costs of transport and accommodation.

We often recruit in our own image, choosing candidates with similar educational backgrounds.

We often favour candidates who have prior experience and understanding of our industry via personal connection, family history and internship.

We create cultural norms and ways of behaving that can seem quite daunting and exclusive to those not familiar with them.

We work with clients that are very similar to us, creating client and agency teams that share very similar life experience and ways of thinking.

Yet it is well documented that diversity of thought leads to better and more effective creative solutions.

That diversity of thought comes from recruiting and accessing talent shaped by different backgrounds and life experience, and by creating work environments where that talent can be flourish and be themselves.

The Covid -19 crisis has shown us that we can work together remotely, that the barriers of location and travel do not have to be barriers, that we can very quickly forge new ways of working that are more collaborative and inclusive, and that we can seek out talent wherever it exists and provide new pathways for talent to seek us out.

We now have a real opportunity to increase our economic diversity and therefore our diversity of thought.

So why don’t we put all the creative and intellectual power at our disposal and do something positive and long lasting about it.