Diversity Report 2016

NZ On Air, as a key funder of local content on television and online content, is in a unique position to observe industry trends.

Recently a number of international industry reports have shed light on gender and ethnic disparity within the screen sector - both in terms of the diversity of people who appear on screen and of the key personnel involved in creating those productions.

NZ On Air will also contribute to this collective research to provide reliable data and promote increased awareness of gender and ethnicity issues in the production industry. While our funded television content, for example, comprises less than 15% of total output, we do not expect the trends in commercially-funded content to be different.

This report is the first in an on-going series which will annually monitor the gender and ethnic diversity among key personnel. We will also monitor the regional spread of production companies.

This first Diversity Report includes survey responses from projects funded in the 2014/15 and 2015/16 financial years that were fully delivered by April 2016.

• Women are well represented among television producers, making up 55% of those surveyed.
• However women are under-represented as directors in both television (33%) and digital (32%) production.
• Women directors are most under-represented in television drama, where they make up just 11% of directors. They are also under-represented in children’s television production where they make up just 30% of directors.
• There is an over-representation of Pākehā personnel across the board and a notable under-representation of Asian key personnel in these projects.
• Among TV producers, people identifying as Asian were just 1% compared to an NZ Asian population of 11.8%. People identifying as Asian make up 2% of television directors and 4% of television writers.
• Māori television directors are relatively well represented at 13% (a fraction under the census population) and television directors identifying as Pacific peoples at 12% exceeded the national population figure of 7.4%.
• In digital production Pākehā are significantly over-represented among producers, however there was a high representation of Pacific people among directors at 14%, and writers/researchers at 17%.

The full report is below. It is also summarised in the infographic.