LOS ANGELES — In 2020, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the nearly 20,000-member-strong group that puts on the Primetime Emmy Awards each fall, was in the midst of much the same reassessment of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as Hollywood's other most influential organizations. Sparked by the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that erupted in 2015 and encouraged by Directors Guild and Cinematographers Society of America programs to hire and train more diverse candidates for industry jobs, the entertainment business' reckoning had already begun.
Then came that summer's protests over the murder of George Floyd.
The unrest "sparked a massive conversation across the entire country about racial representation and social injustice, which served to further cement our desire to ensure that television was doing all it could to improve the status of representation, even in the midst of the pandemic," says Television Academy President and COO Maury McIntyre, who credits Frank Scherma, its chairman and CEO since 2019, with making representation one of the academy's top priorities. The academy engaged DEI consultant ReadySet to conduct a DEI-related survey of its membership in 2021.
