Reprinted from Deadline Hollywood by David Robb on December 15, 2020.
Anita Hill, chair of The Hollywood Commission, is praising the entertainment industry for embracing its role as a “world influencer” in advancing diversity and inclusion, but says that Hollywood can and must do better. “To its credit, the Hollywood community has signaled that it is moving in a new direction,” she writes in an op-ed that will be released later Tuesday to accompany the commission’s final report on its survey of sexual harassment, sexual assault and bias in the entertainment industry.
“The pace of progress and the re-imagining of our workplace puts inclusivity in the spotlight and gives entertainment an auspicious opportunity to reshape itself with diversity and inclusion firmly at the center of its business model, decision making, strategies, operations, and output,” she writes in the op-ed (read it exclusively below). “Now is the time to recommit to diversity and inclusion as a business imperative, a social mandate, and a safeguard against future crisis. Put simply, it is the right thing to do.”
The commission’s four-part survey of more than 9,600 current and former industry workers found that women are “roughly twice as likely as their male counterparts to experience every form of biased or unfair behavior”; that women are twice as likely as men to report experiencing abusive workplace conduct; and that one in 20 industry women said they were sexually assaulted on the job in just the 12 months prior to taking the groundbreaking survey. …
