#NoAllMalePanels, #NoAllWhitePanels. - Introducing The Mission:Visible List

A Snapshot of the Problem

Journalism

Within the sector of journalism, women and people of color are largely underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, within newsrooms across the United States white, male employees dominate the space. In the newspaper, broadcasting and internet publishing industries 77% of all employees working in the field are white and 61% of all employees are men. When it comes to the day-to-day stories that shape public opinion and decision-making, society consumes information from a sector that has not made room for the perspectives and voices of women and people of color.

Film

When it comes to telling stories, shaping the collective imagination, and bringing it all to life on screen, women and people of color also have less power to dictate the storyline and who performs it. On any given evening, one has a disproportionately greater likelihood of watching a film with a white actor in the lead role. Why? Because Black, Latinx, Asian American, or Native American actors only comprise 19.8% of lead actors in movies. Across the board, people of color lack representation amongst film directors, film writers, and cable show creators, the very people with the power to write and envision the stories that influence and reflect both popular culture and haute-culture.

Academia

The world of academia—traditionally seen as the repository of knowledge, old and new—also perpetuates the creation and dispersal of narratives limited in perspective and breadth due to a lack of gender and racial representation. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Black males and females each made up only 3% of the population of full-time faculty teaching at postsecondary institutions in 2018. Similarly, Hispanic males only constituted 3% of the population as did Hispanic females. Asian and Pacific Islander males represented 7% of the population and Asian and Pacific Islander females, only 5%. Contrastingly, 40% of the full-time faculty were white males and 35% were white females.

Business and Private Sector

The private sector proves no better when it comes to representation. Only 1% of Fortune 500 companies are led by Black CEOs and women make up a tiny minority of these leaders; women are just 7.4% of the CEOs at the helm of leading organizations shaping the trajectory of corporate America and its clientele.

While these brief snapshots of a few sectors and industries cannot fully encapsulate the extent to which women and people of color are left out of conversations, excluded from meetings, denied access to the pen, silenced without a mic, and hidden from the spotlight, they do demonstrate one manifestation of racial inequity, the culmination of structural racism which erects barriers, limiting access to educational opportunities, social capital (which includes professional networks), and wealth—several factors that inform one’s ability to receive the credentials, make the connections, and build the skills that allow one to enter certain professional spaces.

Until the structural barriers that prevent women and people of color from accessing entry to certain sectors and industries and positions are dismantled, organizations and those in decision-making roles must continuously use their power and privilege to proactively amplify the voices, spotlight the presence, and elevate the contributions of racially underrepresented individuals who are present but consistently overlooked for opportunities.

Resources for Finding Diverse Voices in the United States

Our curated list is designed to make it easier for you to find and include more women and racially underrepresented voices in your panel line-ups, events, journalism, storytelling, workplaces, policy conversations, and more, in order to add complexity to the discussion, tell truer stories and get the first draft of history right.

We hope that this tool can help leaders and organizations deliberately seek and invite women and people of color onto the stage and into the spotlight. By influencing behavior and decision making, this list can help counteract the powerful and unconscious forces of implicit bias, “the negative associations that people unknowingly hold” which can inform decisions about who is qualified, worthy, or valuable as a guest and speaker to invite.

In addition to serving as an anti-bias tool, this list can also facilitate efforts to reach beyond existing professional networks that may not be racially diverse, thereby increasing the visibility of racially underrepresented experts and professionals and laying the foundation for the creation of new connections.

The ultimate goal of The Mission Visible List is to support anti-bias decision making, to seek gender equality, and to contribute to the larger mission of racial justice. We do so through proactive reinforcement of practices and actions—in this case, facilitating the creation of panels and events that feature racially underrepresented individuals as speakers and panelists—that have been shown to promote equitable access and opportunities.