Entertainment

Diversity and Inclusion, First Report at Netflix

Inclusion according to Myers has been a “cultural value” at Netflix since 2017

Published

4 years ago

March 11, 2021

Mia Lane

Vernā Myers became the VP of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix in 2018

Netflix is headquartered in Los Gatos, California and was founded in 1997 and began streaming programs in 2007. The company now has 203.7 million subscribers world-wide and 73 million in the United States.

Inclusion according to Myers has been a “cultural value” at Netflix since 2017.

“ . . . [W]hen you pair . . . culture with diversity and inclusion – it unlocks our ability to innovate, to be creative, to solve problems,” she said.

She adds that inclusion teams cannot do this alone: “[E]ach employee needs to look at every issue, decision, and meeting, inside and outside the company with inclusion in mind. We call this an “inclusion lens,” where employees ask questions like, whose voice is missing? Who is being excluded? Are we portraying this authentically?”

“When we get that right . . . magic is possible. We’re uplifting stories about Black British lives. We’re chronicling the life of a gay man with cerebral palsy on Tv, a first. We’re moving some of our cash into Black banks.”

The report goes on to talk specifically about representation “by the Numbers”:

A snapshot: women at 47.1% make up half the workforce with 47.8% of directors, 43.7% of vice presidents, and 47.6% of senior leadership.

Additionally, 46.4% of the company’s U.S. workforce and 42% of the leadership are from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups defined as Black, Latinx/Hispanic, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific Islander.

Specifically, Black employees in the United States at Netflix make up 8% of the workforce and 9% of the leadership with 8,000 full time streaming employees as of October 2020.

Of course, Netflix is not only looking inward, but also at its content, realizing that the hires also impact the content and who gets access.

For example, the company’s employees have created access particularly addressing the lack of Black folks in the tech industry by launching a technical bootcamp with HBCU Norfolk University.

Netflix has also partnered with organizations like /dev/color/, techqueria, Ghetto Film School, and TalentoTotal.

During the pandemic events are virtual.

Netflix also commissioned USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to analyze the company’s content this year and every two years through 2026.

Key findings of the report, which analyzed 126 movies and 180 series, found that although white people still dominate both in front of and behind the camera, 15.2% of the original content on Netflix has Black leads or co-leads; 20% of the main cast members in movies were Black.

In terms of directors, 9.2% were Black (nine men and three women).

The report also showed that “Black creatives were much more likely to yield more Black leads and other characters.”

“When you have people of color in the room voicing their opinions, objecting, complaining and celebrating, it changes the texture of what you see,” said George C. Wolfe, director of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” “Diversity has to be a holistic assault. Without it, people are scared of making decisions because they don’t want to make wrong ones, so they end up making no decisions.”

The full report can be found at assets.ctfassets.net.

Wikipedia, CBS News, CNET, The Wall Street Journal, and Hollywood Reporter were sources for this article.

Mia Lane

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Oakland Post: Week of May 7 – 13, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of May 7 – 13, 2025

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4 days ago

May 9, 2025

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Oakland Post: Week of April 30 – May 6, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of April 30 – May 6, 2025

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May 4, 2025

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Arts and Culture

BOOK REVIEW: Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy

When Bridgett M. Davis was in college, her sister Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

Published

2 weeks ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Bridgett M. Davis, c.2025, Harper, $29.99, 367 Pages

Take care.

Do it because you want to stay well, upright, and away from illness. Eat right, swallow your vitamins and hydrate, keep good habits and hygiene, and cross your fingers. Take care as much as you can because, as in the new book, “Love, Rita” by Bridgett M. Davis, your well-being is sometimes out of your hands.

It was a family story told often: when Davis was born, her sister, Rita, then four years old, stormed up to her crying newborn sibling and said, ‘Shut your … mouth!’

Rita, says Davis, didn’t want a little sister then. She already had two big sisters and a neighbor who was somewhat of a “sister,” and this baby was an irritation. As Davis grew, the feeling was mutual, although she always knew that Rita loved her.

Over the years, the sisters tried many times not to fight — on their own and at the urging of their mother — and though division was ever present, it eased when Rita went to college. Davis was still in high school then, and she admired her big sister.

She eagerly devoured frequent letters sent to her in the mail, signed, “Love, Rita.”

When Davis was in college herself, Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

First, they lost their father. Drugs then invaded the family and addiction stole two siblings. A sister and a young nephew were murdered in a domestic violence incident. Their mother was devastated; Rita’s lupus was an “added weight of her sorrow.”

After their mother died of colon cancer, Rita’s lupus took a turn for the worse.

“Did she even stand a chance?” Davis wrote in her journal.

“It just didn’t seem possible that she, someone so full of life, could die.”

Let’s start here: once you get past the prologue in “Love, Rita,” you may lose interest. Maybe.

Most of the stories that author Bridgett M. Davis shares are mildly interesting, nothing rare, mostly commonplace tales of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a sibling. There are a lot of these kinds of stories, and they tend to generally melt together. After about fifty pages of them, you might start to think about putting the book aside.

But don’t. Not quite yet.

In between those everyday tales, Davis occasionally writes about being an ailing Black woman in America, the incorrect assumptions made by doctors, the history of medical treatment for Black people (women in particular), attitudes, and mythologies. Those passages are now and then, interspersed, but worth scanning for.

This book is perhaps best for anyone with the patience for a slow-paced memoir, or anyone who loves a Black woman who’s ill or might be ill someday. If that’s you and you can read between the lines, then “Love, Rita” is a book to take in carefully.