News Corp bosses laud diversity as staff encouraged to respect pronouns

Executives at News Corp Australia say the business has made marked improvements on diversity and inclusion in the workplace over the past year, after the media giant encouraged staff to stipulate their pronouns on various internal platforms.

The decision was rolled out as an early objective of News Corp’s diversity, equity and inclusion team in March last year, according to emails and documents obtained by Crikey, alongside a three-part company-wide education and awareness campaign around “exploring unconscious bias”, “creating an inclusive culture” and “understanding allyship”.

In an email sent to all staff on December 14, the team reported 211 staff had attended its unconscious-bias training over 20 sessions, which resulted in a “25% increase in awareness”.

The “creating an inclusive culture” workshops, rolled out over 16 sessions, were attended by 153 staff, resulting in a “24% increase in awareness”, while 10 “understanding allyship” sessions were attended by 78 employees, with a “35% increase in awareness”.

In the lead-up to the sessions, staff were told they would need to complete the first two modules before they could attend the “understanding allyship” sessions.

The prerequisites were highlighted in communique distributed earlier in the year, which included tips for managers on how to cut out “distorted power dynamics and bias” in meetings, how to build inclusion in the workplace across the board, and etiquette around pronouns.

Staff were encouraged to put their pronouns into the internal record system in March last year, according to documents seen by Crikey.

News Corp Australia’s company-wide cultural reform efforts come as it continues to deal with behavioural issues among the top brass of The Australian, the company’s most prized local publishing asset.

In early February The Australian Financial Review revealed that The Australian’s deputy editor, Sid Maher, was the latest senior editor to depart after he was accused of grabbing the chest of a female colleague at a Christmas drinks party last year. The newspaper reported Maher disputed the allegations.

A few months earlier, editor-in-chief Chris Dore was forced to resign after making “inappropriate” comments towards a woman at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference in California, after first citing “personal health reasons”.

Dore’s successor, News Corp veteran Michelle Gunn, did not acknowledge the cultural challenges facing the paper and its broader parent company when stepping into the role, and has remained tight-lipped about how The Australian is tracking with the broader business’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.

News Corp did not respond to a request for comment.

Just three days ago, The Australian’s associate editor Chris Kenny argued in a column critical of left-leaning media that the gender pay gap comes as a result of choices made by women because “it is illegal to pay different rates to different sexes for the same work”, his latest in the broadsheet’s war on all things “woke”.

About one month earlier, the paper published an op-ed by Quillette editor Claire Lehmann railing against the availability of gender-affirmative care for minors.

Across News Corp’s publishing assets — including The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun tabloids and Sky News — editorial coverage often toes the line with adverse reporting on the same cultural issues that News Corp is trying to address internally.

For years, its Australian mastheads have railed against gender issues and the use of pronouns. In a 2018 story, Sky News host and Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt called government adoption of pronouns an “overreaction” that would force people to walk on “linguistic eggshells”.

The Rupert Murdoch-controlled media behemoth came under fire for similar editorial discrepancies when it announced in late 2021 that it would ramp up coverage of climate change as part of a campaign backing global net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The announcement was received with scepticism.

“Colour me sceptical,” Michael E Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told The New York Times. “Until Rupert Murdoch and News Corp call off their attack dogs at Fox News and The Wall Street Journal … these are hollow promises that should be viewed as a desperate ploy to rehabilitate the public image of a leading climate villain”.

Speaking about the campaign in September 2021, News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller said the campaign would see its Australian mastheads cover “all views”, and that the publisher’s controversial slate of commentators “will not be muzzled”.

Bolt, who in the past has claimed climate change is a “cult of the elites”, continues to colour his coverage of the issue with shades of climate denialism.

But leadership at the company maintains that those participating in News Corp’s cultural facelift are taking away material learnings that can be used “inside and outside” work. The all-staff email sent in December quoted a number of employees with positive reflections.

“Brilliant workshop,” reads one. “We are very blessed to have this resource and content. Not only will it support us at work but also make me a better human outside of work.”