The BBC has announced that it will have equal gender parity by 2020, with more women both on-screen and in leadership roles.
The company also declared that it was aiming for 15 per cent of its employees to be from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) background.
Women currently make up 48.8 per cent of the BBC’s workforce, but the organisation has pledged, “to go further than ever before on targets for the representation of women, disabled people, ethnic minorities and LGBT people on and off air.”
A BBC spokesperson said, “Almost half of our workforce is made up of women and the proportion of our workforce who are black, Asian and other ethnic minority is at an all-time high.”
“We’ll continue doing what works but also develop new and innovative ideas to do even better, and we’ll set this out in our new diversity strategy shortly.”
Continuing they said, “Significant steps forward have been taken but it is important to us that the BBC is truly representative of all our audiences – diversity is more than any single characteristic.”
“We are the BBC and must be held to a higher standard. The range of the BBC’s programme and services, and the fact that we will make sure that our approach to diversity is hardwired in everything we do, make these targets even more ambitious.”
This news comes as the former culture minister, David Lammy criticised the BBC for not doing enough to promote diversity, last week.
Speaking in the House of Commons, the Labour MP said, “I am growing tired of strategies, of new approaches, of action plans, of initiatives and press releases.”
“The net result of all these strategies and initiatives is sadly very little. Despite the good intentions, rhetoric has not been matched by real progress.”
