Looking back on No Man’s Land, and the need to set gender diversity targets
Which-50 editor Tess Bennett looks back on the lessons learned from last month's experiment where the site erased men from the its coverage.
For most of July Which-50 secretly erased men from our coverage. Then we told the world about it.
We documented the process of excluding men and what we learned in a cover story titled No Man’s Land. This piece was accompanied by stories from 22 women about the misogyny they’ve experienced in the workplace titled Men, Sucking.
Due to a lack of social activity from women not sharing stories about themselves as enthusiastically as men do (and prior to publishing No Man’s Land), our traffic was down around 15 per cent for the month. This would have represented our first decline in seven months. However the strong reaction to the cover story and associated coverage meant July set a new audience record, finishing 7 per cent higher month-on-month. The irony that discrimination drove this success was not lost on us.
More importantly, the two stories got people talking. They were shared close to 1,500 times across social media, picked up by our media peers at sites like Mumbrella, and elicited a broad range of feedback, with readers calling the experiment: interesting, brave, controversial and depressing.
Well worth a read “For the month of July, we secretly erased men from Which-50. Our audience numbers dropped, our social presence evaporated & we annoyed people who for years have helped us build our brand off the back of their hard work & expertise” https://t.co/bIhArfQSTT
— Annie Parker ? (@annie_parker) July 30, 2018
No Man’s Land – @Which50 erased men from their coverage in July and this was the result. Brilliant – if sobering – experiment by @TessBennett https://t.co/slI4LcnD7h
— Kate Dinon (@katedinon) July 30, 2018
Compelling read. Congratulations and thank you @Which50 for taking the risk and telling how it is -warts and all. https://t.co/sfpVQsheIf
— Cath Resnick (@CathResnick) August 2, 2018
What a fantastic initiative @Which50 GREAT to see a media outlet actively pushing for female voices in business to be heard. UNFORTUNATE that it takes such measures to do so. https://t.co/XEWuufQIJ2
— Robyn Challands (@RobynZimmy) July 31, 2018
On LinkedIn, Wendy Hogan CX, Marketing and Strategy Director at Oracle commented, “Fascinating and enlightening experiment Andrew Birmingham. Congratulations for your team’s hard work and perseverance to see it through. What a stark reminder for us all to keep focused on eliminating bias in business.”
Many women identified with the stories we published and have approached us with their own experiences and feelings of frustration.
A managing director of a software company reached out to say he hadn’t succeeded in past to improve gender diversity figures, but article like ours would hold people like him to account to persevere and try harder. Which was kinda the whole point.
We also need to try harder. The experiment revealed a major weakness on our part, we don’t have a big enough contact book of female executives.
So while we are being transparent, we have decided to publish our gender diversity figures – ie the number of men and women we name or quote in stories – each month for the rest of the year.
We’ve already made a start with the chart below and will endeavour to update the stats weekly. So we don’t slip back into bad habits, we will also be setting targets to make sure we’re including more female voices in our coverage. In August, our goal is to match last month’s figure of 45 women and build that up to 60 or 70 women by the end of the year.
Why Targets?
Speaking on a panel in Sydney last week, Ming Long, who is the Chair of AMP Capital Funds Management Limited, said she was a proponent of targets “even if it is just to remind us that we are biased in our thinking”.
There won’t be any other changes to our editorial policy, we’ll still cover the same things we’ve always covered, but a deliberate and ongoing effort to combat the bias in our industry will lead to an improved product for our readers, who’ll benefit from a wider range of expertise than we’ve published in the past.
More SJW claptrap. Just hire whoever is most qualified for the job. It’s not that difficult.
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Excellent marketing strategy.
Insult half your market, and then hope to lift overall sales and profitability.
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Don’t expect any logic from an anti-reason ideology
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Great experiment acknowledging the bias that exists in reporting and having a plan to fix it.
Well done
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“we have decided to publish our gender diversity figures – ie the number of men and women we name or quote in stories”
Just men and women? So… you mean ‘parity’, not ‘diversity’.
As someone who sexually identifies as an attack helicopter, I reject your bigoted, CIS-gendered approach to ‘diversity’ (read: female entitlement).
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If any magazine would cut-out part of their usual coverage, logically readership drops as people don’t find the content they were looking for. This experiment and it’s outcomes aren’t really saying anything about gender equality or contributing towards achieving it; same disappointment and drop in traffic would happen if the magazine would cut out coverage about ‘digital’ or ‘leadership’ for a month. In a way the magazine made a point; but there isn’t really a key learning or insight here, or an roadmap to close the gap.
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So your graph above indicates that YOU are biased towards stories on men yet, without any data, you turn that around to be the fault of men because they are more egotistical? So even when you have a female editor it’s still mens’ fault.
I’m all for equality of opportunity but some logic please.
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