African Americans have worked in advertising since the modern American advertising industry emerged more than 100 years ago. Yet as employment discrimination has sharply diminished across the American labor market over recent decades, systemic barriers to equal opportunity in this $31 billion a year industry have remained largely intact. This report presents multiple measures of how Black professionals and managers are treated compared to Whites with similar qualifications. Across these measures, the Black–White gap averages 38% larger in advertising than in the overall U.S. labor market. The divergence between racial equality in this industry and the rest of the labor market is more than twice as large today as 30 years ago.
Disturbing new report posted on the NAACP website.