As part of our ongoing commitment to diversity, we are publishing statistics showing the current makeup of our full-time staff through prisms of racial and ethnic diversity, and gender and LGBTQIA+ identity. The statistics were gathered from an online survey asking our staff members how they identify themselves. This is an ongoing effort and we will continue to publish updated diversity data.

FRONTLINE’s 2020 numbers show that when it comes to gender diversity, women make up about 74 percent of our staff. Nearly 27 percent of our staff members self-identify as having a non-white racial or ethnic background: roughly 12 percent are black or African American, 9 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and 3 percent are Asian and 3 percent Middle Eastern. And 24 percent of our staff identify as members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

FRONTLINE has embarked on a number of efforts to increase staff diversity, including:

• The creation of the FRONTLINE/Firelight Investigative Journalism Fellowship, a partnership between FRONTLINE and Firelight Media that supports diverse independent producers interested in investigative storytelling. Other paid fellowships in collaboration with the Columbia University School of Journalism and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY have also helped FRONTLINE recruit journalists from diverse backgrounds.
• Hosting Emma Bowen Foundation Fellows each summer in our digital video unit. This will be FRONTLINE’s third year working with the Emma Bowen Foundation, which provides paid internships to students of color at media companies across the country and works to educate and place students in all areas of the media industry.
• The launch of the Local Journalism Initiative. With support from the John and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the initiative works to strengthen local investigative journalism in communities where it needs support; we also emphasize the importance to our media partners of including journalists from diverse backgrounds, and covering stories that affect communities often underrepresented in the media.
• The establishment of a diversity committee at FRONTLINE. The committee has developed a guide to equitable hiring for managers, administers FRONTLINE’s staff diversity survey, and is currently leading an audit of FRONTLINE’s documentaries focused on quantifying and assessing on-camera representation of people from historically marginalized groups.