Cesar Conde, chairman at NBCUniversal News Group, announced a groundbreaking goal to have a 50% diverse workforce at NBCUniversal, according to Deadline. Conde, the first Latino in this role, outlined his plans in an internal video for employees on Wednesday.
The ultimate goal is for NBCUniversal, No. 7 on DiversityInc’s 2020 Top 50 Companies for Diversity List, to have 50% women and 50% total nonwhite employees. The corporation’s progress will be reported annually and increasing diversity will be part of leadership’s performance metrics in 2021, which is tied to their compensation.
According to Conde, NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC is 26.5% diverse with 8% of employees being Black, 8% Hispanic, 8% Asian, 2% multi-racial and less than 1% Native American. The workforce is already nearly 50% women.
“That’s better than most in our industry – but it is not good enough,” Conde said in the video, according to reporting by Deadline.
Newsroom employees are still predominantly white and male in the U.S., according to an analysis of 2012-2016 American Community Survey data by the Pew Research Center. Nationwide, newsroom employees are 77% non-Hispanic white men and women.
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There is currently no timeline to reach the 50% goal, but there is a strategic plan, including improving recruitment and education programs for employees, more in-depth investigative pieces on nonwhite communities, increasing hiring instead of relying on freelancers and offering free master classes for journalists and producers through NBCUniversity.
The diversity goal also stretches over to NBC News and MSNBC, where the goal is for 50% women among guests and experts and 40% nonwhite people. At CNBC, leadership plans to increase representation of people of color by at least 10%.
“The NBCUniversal News Group is not going to wait for change to happen and just react to it. We’re going to lead,” Conde said in the video.
“We will put an emphasis at the senior producer level as well as entry level to ensure we are building a strong pipeline of future leaders and highly qualified individuals… And we recognize that to create economic diversity within our ranks, we will need to be creative in compensating Interns, News Associates and entry level employees.”
