A   WIFT Canada Coalition study on the impact of COVID-19 affecting efforts to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in the Canadian film and TV industry finds that the screen industry is “uneven, closed and defensive” to the disadvantage of equity-seeking groups.

Deciding on Diversity: COVID-19, Risk and Intersectional Inequality in the Canadian Film and Television Industry, found that the Canadian film and television industry was male-dominated and averse to taking risks involving equity, diversity and inclusion when it came to decision-making practices, according to the report co-authored by Amanda Coles from Australia’s Deakin University and Deb Verhoeven, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the University of Alberta.

It was funded by the federal government’s Emergency Support Fund for Cultural, Heritage and Sport Organizations as distributed by the Canada Media Fund.

Through adopting an innovative methodology and interviewing influential “key players,” industry executives and content creators, Coles and Verhoeven also discovered that approaches due to policy shift were “widely tokenistic” despite the opportunity to use the pandemic to reassess and re-evaluate hiring practices.

Addressing the many aspects of risk as a key denominator behind industry-made decisions, Deciding on Diversity found that  “risk perceptions and narratives are frequently deployed to avoid change.”

“‘Diversity’ efforts are focused on adding a minimal number of ‘diverse’ people (i.e., those who are not straight white men) to meet equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) agendas set by policymakers,” the report observed.

Interestingly, “all the men who were identified as key players either declined or did not respond to requests to be interviewed for the study.”

Deciding on Diversity also found “that the whiteness of the corporate leadership and executive workforce in the Canadian film and television industry poses a significant risk to advancing EDI.”

The study concludes with a recommendation to establish a national screen industry taskforce “to inform organizational and policy decision-making and challenge the widely held risk perceptions that act as barriers to diversity and inclusion” and a “zero-tolerance” approach to EDI failures, with suggest that government funding be conditional on the implementation of those practices and denied if those conditions aren’t met.

And how did COVID-19 factor into the study? The authors stated that the pandemic was a call-to-action, due to the different working conditions created by the virus and how workplaces and employment conditions were “radically reconceived.”

“In this new remote, quarantined working world, close creative relationships became physically distanced, opening-up the potential for new connections and innovative decision-making,” the report states. “Importantly, occupational health and safety risk management decisions under COVID-19 protocols opened the industry to viable, fairer production work models.”

Instead, the authors found that little had changed and the system needs an overhaul.

“Despite posing serious legal, reputational, and political risks to the screen industry, toxic individuals and workplaces were not identified as key threats to advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion,” the report states in its findings. “Meaningful change requires re-conceptualizing risk, as well as understanding how it is used specifically and systemically to perpetuate inequality and reinforce current systems of power and domination.”

In statements, both Coles and Verhoeven called for change.

“The industry must come to terms with how risk management is used as a tool to normalize and justify decision-making practices that exclude dynamic stories, highly talented content creators and the global majority of audiences,” said Coles.

“Without better data and data tools to understand both the systemic and specific ways inequality is perpetuated in the industry, we are trapped in a cycle of confounded good intentions. We can do better than this,” said Verhoeven in a separate statement.

The report can be downloaded here.