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As DE&I crumbles, don’t go back to the good old, bad old days
January 21, 2025
My shortest ever job lasted just 24 hours. I was given a promotion, and to paraphrase George Michael, the very next day they took it away.
It was the late 1990s and I was a journalist on the Birmingham Evening Mail with 10 years’ experience under my belt.
This was still the heyday of regional journalism. The open plan newsroom was the size of a football pitch, packed with journalists and with colleagues from three different papers (The Mail, The Post and the Sunday Mercury) working cheek-by-jowl.
People smoked, people drank, people shouted and swore. It was Life on Mars.
I remember the day clearly that I was summoned to the editor’s office and told I was getting promoted from the business desk to the news desk. This was huge. The news desks of all three papers were all-male. I was a pioneer. This was huge – and yet so short-lived.
The next day I was called back in to say they were rescinding the offer because they hadn’t realised that a male colleague was interested in the role, and he would now be getting the job. I left the editor’s office devastated and with the words ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’ ringing in my ears. Not long afterwards I voted with my feet and secured a job in the BBC Publicity Department and so began my career in communications.
Younger colleagues today look on in disbelief that such a thing could have happened. They have benefited from years of brave souls and allies who have championed equal rights and called for investment in DE&I. They couldn’t imagine it ever happening to them.
And yet here we are.
Behemoths including Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s and no doubt many more businesses of all sizes are culling their DE&I programmes ahead of a slurry (and I use that word deliberately) of Trumpian executive orders. Too easily and glibly can these moves be dismissed as a war on the wokery that has got out of hand. But we need to remember how far we’ve come and think about how easy it could be to regress.
A recent reunion for the Birmingham Evening Mail was a horribly bittersweet experience. Looking back, I had some great times there with some of the sharpest, funniest, talented people I’ve had the privilege of working with. Sadly, those huge newsrooms and scores of journalists speaking truth to power are no more. The odd few that still cling on to regional journalism having been reduced to chasing clickbait. Oh, the good old days where have they gone?
But among the back-slapping reunion bonhomie, women gathered and shared their stories. The brilliant specialist who could not have ‘correspondent’ in her job title because the male editor, who was happy to tell anyone who would listen, ‘didn’t and never would promote women’; the journalist who was told she was underperforming despite breaking more exclusives than anyone else. (It turned out her targets were higher than her male colleagues.) And the amazing woman who wouldn’t accept ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’ and saw her boss eventually sacked for bullying and sexual harassment. A victory you could say, but it would have been so much better if she hadn’t had to fight the fight.
And let’s not forget, that this paper was at the heart of the multi-cultural West Midlands, but in my time, there were only two journalists who weren’t white.
The good old days, or, really, the bad old days?
I was shocked when I joined the BBC. No-one shouted. No-one threw things. There were women in positions of power. I know I speak from a position of privilege compared to others, so as businesses row back on their DE&I initiatives, it is incumbent on those of us who remember the bad old days to do what we can.
To champion our own best practices at work and in what we recommend to clients. To ensure any progress in DE&I is not lost.
Don’t accept that there is nothing you can do about it.