Michael Friedenberg, the president of Reuters, sent out the following to the staff on Tuesday:
Colleagues, There has been a fair amount of discussion about the recently-published Women’s Media Center report on the status of women in U.S. media. That report highlights the continued need for U.S. media to ramp up existing inclusivity efforts. In particular it notes that women represent only 32% of U.S. bylines at Reuters. Whether or not this estimate is entirely accurate, it is certainly true that we have a great deal of work to do in this area.
I know that making continued progress in this space takes focus and long-term commitment. In talking to many of you, I have been impressed by the passion that exists at Reuters to enhance diversity and inclusion within our company and industry in the U.S. and globally. I’m also encouraged by some of the progress we have made over the past few years, some insights into which I have included below. This includes increasingly successful efforts to hire and develop diverse talent, enabling us to continue to move towards a workforce and news file that reflects the world we live in.
Regarding our current Reuters diversity and inclusion metrics and efforts, there are a few key things I’d like to call out: Currently, roughly 42% of all Reuters staff globally are women and in the U.S. it is 41%. In senior management positions we have 27% women. These proportions have been increasing gradually since 2014.
Our efforts to attract and select diverse talent of all kinds resulted in women representing 57% of hires in 2018. This represents a significant jump of nearly 10% since 2015. At senior management level our efforts resulted in 63% of all senior management new hires being women.
Supporting these efforts, we work to ensure diverse candidate slates for all roles across all levels of employees and are actively focused on building the pipeline of women into management positions.
Specific to the U.S. we have significant outreach efforts in place including actively recruiting from and partnering with minority journalism groups and offering a number of scholarships, fellowship programs, trainee programs, summer internship programs and editorial learning training programs.
While diversity data apart from gender is difficult to gather outside the U.S. because of local laws on what information employers may ask staff to provide – even voluntarily – we do know from what we are able to track that the number of diverse hires at Reuters at least roughly doubled in percentage terms in 2018.
We’re also working to ensure diversity on major news stories, such as reaching out internally to assemble a diverse pool of staff to cover the 2020 U.S. presidential election and 2020 Olympics.
We have ensured women make up a strong proportion of all regional editorial leadership courses and have groups that come together to create a more inclusive work environment, including the Reuters Women’s Network and the Women in Leadership group.
In 2018, we collaborated with the International Center of Photography to host a ‘Women in Focus’ event celebrating women in photography.
Yet, we still have work to do. That’s why we’ve stepped up our ambitions and hard-coded this into our Reuters Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for 2019. Specifically, we have committed to “Continue to develop a more diverse and inclusive culture.” and “Improve our gender diversity within senior management to 40%.” These key results reflect my commitment to building your continued trust in the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. It also means taking action to continue to ensure diverse talent is developed, seen, listened to, heard, respected and valued.
I am eager to play my role in making this a fun, creative, supportive place where employees bring their true selves to work. To retain great talent this is a “must” – we must continue to be an organization that is diverse and inclusive.
I hope you will join me in playing a role in this effort and keeping me and Reuters focused on this important initiative. We’ll keep you informed about our progress. To read more about our Diversity and Inclusion efforts at Thomson Reuters, click here.
If you have any questions, please ask.
Best, Michael
