An exhaustive new study of America's advertising industry has found dramatic levels of racial discrimination throughout the industry. Bias against African-American professionals was found in pay, hiring, promotions, assignments, and other areas.
The study was initiated by a coalition of legal, civil rights, and industry leaders who created the Madison Avenue Project. The Project was created in 2008 to address advertising's deep-rooted racial bias and today, Cyrus Mehri, Project leader and prominent civil rights lawyer, called the findings "absolutely astonishing in this day and age." Angela Ciccolo, Interim General Counsel of the NAACP, another project partner, commented that "the time has come to stand up to change this industry."
Overall, the findings reveal that racial discrimination is 38 percent worse in the advertising industry than in the overall U.S. labor market, and that the "discrimination divide" between advertising and other U.S. industries is more than twice as bad now as it was 30 years ago.
Specific findings include:
- Black college graduates working in advertising earn $.80 for every dollar earned by their equally-qualified White counterparts;
- Based on national demographic data, 9.6 percent of advertising managers and professionals should be African-Americans. The actual percentage in 2008 is 5.3 percent, representing a difference of 7,200 executive-level jobs;
- About 16 percent of large advertising firms employ no black managers or professionals, a rate 60 percent higher than in the overall labor market;
- Black managers and professionals in the industry are only one-tenth as likely as their White counterparts to earn $100,000 a year;
- Blacks are only 62 percent as likely as their white counterparts to work in the powerful "creative" and "client contact" functions in advertising agencies;
- Eliminating the industry's current black-white employment gap would require tripling its Black managers and professionals.
Though employment discrimination has sharply diminished in America in the last 40 years, systemic barriers to equality in the $31 billion a year advertising industry have not budged. In 1978, for example, the New York City Human Rights Commission found that limited minority employment "was not simply the result of neutral forces, but emanated directly from discriminatory practices." Those practices continue today.
The study found the primary source of discrimination to be agencies' implicit assumption that the cause of Black under-representation is a shortage of
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