Some organisations are monitoring content for gender balance and other diversity metrics: understanding the scale of the problem is the first step to fixing it.<\/p>\n
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Across journalism, radio, television, film, music, drama, events, public relations and advertising, groups are monitoring large volumes of content for their gender balance and increasingly for other diversity metrics. The focus is to gather the data and then do something about it \u2013 and the raw numbers are often worse than we imagine. The Geena Davis Institute<\/a> revealed within the last decade male leading characters still outnumbered female main characters 2:1 in top-grossing family films.<\/p>\n The BBC has the 50:50 Project<\/a>, which comprehensively tracks the gender balance of contributors. Across other organisations, bots are also crawling web pages for metrics; The Financial Times has JanetBot<\/a>, or there\u2019s an open-source tool from GenderMeme<\/a>. Bloomberg<\/a> has the Gender Equality Index, which helps investors monitor and compare the financial performance of listed companies that say they are committing to advancing women. There\u2019s also the GA Tally<\/a> tool, which enables anyone share on social media the gender (im)balance they witness every day. People use it to name and shame at events, panels or \u2013 heaven forbid \u2013 ‘manels<\/a>‘ across multiple industries.<\/p>\n Counting matters \u2013 hard data and statistics are crucial for driving cultural change. If you don\u2019t have an accurate picture of the scale of your problem, it\u2019s much easier to ignore, sometimes for decades. That\u2019s why the rise of diversity and inclusion trackers is a very big deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is one of the 101 indispensable things you need to know about work today. Click here <\/a>to see the rest.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n