Netflix Clings to DEI

A devastating and chilling article, “The Lost Generation,” by Jason Savage, was recently published in Compact about systematic discrimination against white men. The author, a scriptwriter, dedicates a portion of the article to DEI in Hollywood:

“Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door. The Writers Guild lists more than a dozen studio-run initiatives for emerging “diverse” writers. The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men. Nearly every capsule bio for these programs is an attempt to communicate, with as little subtlety as possible, that the writer is not a white man (“a Korean and Polish American writer from Seattle”; “a comedy writer with Cuban, Puerto Rican, and New Mexican roots”). . . .

In the 2010s, Sundance came under fire for producing a disproportionate number of white male auteurs. The organization decided that it would never happen again. In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the screenwriters lab were white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure turned out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8 percent) of the fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly all have either had some other defining characteristic (disabled, gay) or were partnered with a woman or a person of color. Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man.”

Compact’s article provides a useful service by compiling data that undermine popular claims along the lines of “DEI amounted to nothing more than instructional seminars” or “DEI simply expanded the opportunities available to improve the workplace.” But it is worth remembering that we shouldn’t need to read long-form summaries about DEI-style discrimination, complete with dozens of statistics, because Tinsel Town explicitly told us for years exactly what it was doing, and we see the results onscreen.

Consider one of the worst offenders with respect to both hiring and content, Netflix, which is now in the news because of its possible purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. In his article, Savage supplies an anecdote previously unknown to most of us: “A friend who’s now an executive at a major crypto company scraped by as a freelance film editor for years. He applied to Netflix five times; eventually he was told, explicitly, that they didn’t need more white guys.”

Those of us who log into Netflix and browse the available content probably suspected that DEI has long permeated the hiring department and the production studios. A report released in May this year by USC Annenberg states Netflix grew from hiring 31 percent women writers in 2018 to 47 percent in 2023 — the latter being 17 percent higher compared to the television industry. Per the same report, more than 70 percent of Netflix’s series in 2023 had a lead or co-lead from an “underrepresented [racial/ethnic] group,” compared with 58 percent of series across the industry, which prompts us to conclude that these minorities are not “underrepresented.”

But for those who don’t have a subscription (nor leech off a family member’s plan), the corporation has been transparent about its commitment to DEI — even today, when other businesses have perceived shifting attitudes and anticipated potentially ruinous court decisions. In an annual form required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Netflix declared this year that it works to “build diversity, inclusion and equity into all aspects of our operations globally, with the goal of having diversity and inclusion function as a critical lens through which each Netflix employee carries out their role.” That document is dated after President Trump issued an executive order in January that directed all agencies to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” And, more recently, Netflix reconfirmed its DEI commitments when 99 percent of shareholders voted to reject and anti-DEI resolution; a shareholder group asked the board to produce a report evaluating whether it was at risk due to its DEI-style initiatives, such as its contributions to the Black Economic Development Fund and its investments in the “the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity,” but the board simply declared (rather dubiously) that it is an “equal opportunity employer” with “a well-established compliance program.” By comparison, some of Netflix’s competitors have attempted to rectify their errors. For example, Paramount Global announced shortly after Trump’s executive order that it would end some of its DEI policies, per a memo reviewed by NBC News.

But perhaps Netflix feels it must defend its DEI practices amid the Trump crusade because its first “vice president of inclusion strategy,” Vernā Myers, suggested that not being actively anti-racist is immoral: “To be neutral is to be complicit,” she said. She added, “If you’re not doing something, racism is on automatic. It’s true for all the isms. . . We can’t get rid of racism unless everybody does what they can to move toward an anti-bias stance.” In a 2021 interview, Myers asserted that DEI suffuses all of Netflix: “Our overarching vision is that every employee at Netflix be equipped with the consciousness and the competency, the compassion and the courage, necessary to transform what they do every day into an inclusive sort of situation.” (Do you hear the Soviet anthem playing in the background as she says this?) Myers, who left Netflix in 2023, did in fact transform the company, and Deadline reports that Netflix’s white employees fell to 42.8 percent in 2021.

As Savage concludes his Compact article, “I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so.” As the crusade against DEI continues, we must remember that such policies and initiatives were not the unfortunate, accidental products of good intentions, but rather strategically crafted to disfavor white men as a form of civilizational revenge. Young white men today not only know that the world is unfair, but that it is unfair for the benefit of others by design. Moreover, even as the administration pursues a wide range of counteractive measures, some massive corporations — like Netflix — continue entrenching discrimination throughout their business and applaud themselves for doing so.