The STAT Diversity and Inclusion Committee is proud to present STAT’s inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Report. Here, we share the self-reported gender and racial/ethnic demographics of our staff from STAT’s inception in 2015 through 2022. This report presents an opportunity to reaffirm STAT’s commitment to becoming the most diverse media company covering the life sciences and health care. It also allows us to transparently identify areas where STAT can improve, as well as set a standard by which we can hold ourselves accountable as our news organization continues to grow.
Snapshot of our findings
- In 2015, women were underrepresented on staff and in management. In 2022, they made up a majority of the company and management.
- The percentage of the entire staff who are people of color has doubled since 2015, growing from 15% to 31%. Among our editorial staff, that percentage has more than tripled over the same time period, growing from 9% to 30%.
- The percentage of managers who are people of color remains the same in 2022 as it was in 2015, at 20%.
- Black/African American employees and Hispanic/Latino employees are underrepresented at STAT when compared with the U.S. population.
- Two-thirds of all new hires in 2022 were women. Nearly two-thirds of all new hires in 2022 were non-Hispanic or non-Latino white.
Jump to: Staff Composition – Our Ongoing Efforts – Note from Leadership
Staff Composition
The terms used are those used by the EEOC. Data is self-reported by employees at their time of hire.
Gender
Staff only had two options for self-reporting gender identity: female and male. This is a shortcoming that we hope to address in the future to better represent a breadth of gender identities.
Since STAT’s founding in 2015, the percentage of female staff members has increased from 35% to 61%. Female managers also tripled from 20% to a 60% majority.
Managers are defined as employees who have at least one direct report.
Between 2015 and 2022, the percentage of female employees among our editorial staff (reporters, editors, producers, etc.) increased from 41% to 55%.
Data from the Pew Research Center has found that the percentage of female journalists across the country who focus on the health beat is around 64% (and 38% for the science & tech beat).
Among our non-editorial teams — including business, product & engineering, and operations teams — the proportion of female staff increased from 21% to 69%. The percentage of male staff decreased from 79% to 31%.
Note from leadership: “The shift was a result of having a number of new positions added to the non-editorial teams and having expectations set that all hiring managers would make sure they were interviewing a diverse pool of candidates.” – Angus Macaulay, Chief Operating Officer
Race & Ethnicity
In some graphs, employees who did not identify as “White not Hispanic or Latino” have been grouped together under the category “POC” for people of color. This includes employees who self-identified as “Asian”, “Black or African American”, “Hispanic or Latino”, or “Two or more races”. From 2015 to 2022, no STAT employee identified as “American Indian or Alaska Native” or as “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander”.
Since 2015, the percentage of STAT staff members who are people of color increased from 15% to 31%. But among managers, that percentage was 20% in both 2015 and 2022.
White staff decreased from 85% to 69%. The number of managers who were white was 80% in both 2015 and 2022. In seven years, there has been no overall increase in the percentage of people of color in management at STAT, despite the percentage of people of color doubling among all staff.
For context, people of color make up about 43.1% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic or non-Latino white people make up 59.3%, according to recent U.S. Census data.
Note from leadership: “The lack of growth of diversity among management vs. all staff is a function of a few things. First, there has been a larger growth of overall new staff positions vs. manager positions, which has enabled us to build a more diverse overall staff quicker. We also have not had significant turnover of existing managers. We strongly encourage promoting from within, so expect that our team of managers will become more diverse as jobs open up as we have a much more diverse overall staff.” – Angus Macaulay, Chief Operating Officer
The percentage of editorial staff members who are people of color increased from 9% to 31% from 2015 to 2022. The percentage who are white decreased from 91% to 69%.
STAT currently has a higher percentage of people of color in its newsroom than in newsrooms across the country that cover similar topic areas, per data from the Pew Research Center. According to that data, 18% of journalists covering the health beat are people of color and 78% are white (17% covering the science & tech beat are people of color and 77% are white).
Among non-editorial staff, the percentage of people of color increased slightly from 29% in 2015 to 31% in 2022. White non-editorial staffers made up around 69% in 2015 and 2022.
Note from leadership: “Overall the shift in diversity on staff is a result of a conscious effort of the entire staff at STAT to make diversity a priority as we have built out the team. That starts with proactive outreach to post jobs on a broad mix of websites, job boards, and organizations with the goal of broadening the awareness of our jobs to a more diverse pool of candidates.”
Among STAT staff members who identify as people of color in 2022, those identifying as Asian make up 12% of staff. Black or African American staff represent 9% and Hispanic or Latino staff also represent 9% of STAT. Those who identify as two or more races represent about 2% of STAT staff.
For context, 2020 U.S. Census data found that 6.1% of the U.S. population is Asian; 13.6% is Black or African American; 18.9% is Hispanic and Latino; about 3% identify as two or more races. Black or African American staff and Hispanic and Latino staff are underrepresented at STAT when compared with the general population.
In 2022, STAT hired 32 new employees. Most of the people who joined STAT in 2022 were female. Most new hires were white, which is part of a trend seen across other media companies as well.
To see how STAT compares to some of our peer media sites, here are recent diversity data reports from ProPublica, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Axios, and this publishers’ diversity statistics tracker by Digiday. We have also compiled a numerical snapshot of how STAT stacks up at the end of this report.
Some values may add up to above or below 100% because all percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number. Interns and Sharon Begley Fellows are included in our data. We also acknowledge that this report does not include data about sexual orientation, faith, disability, veteran status, socioeconomic status and other aspects of our staff’s diversity. STAT’s HR does not collect this data from its employees.
Our Ongoing Efforts
Note from Angus Macaulay, Chief Operating Officer
“In terms of commitments going forward, we will continue to expect all hiring managers and our HR partners to post a job on our site as well as other sites where we can attract a diverse pool of candidates. We will also continue to expect managers to interview a diverse pool of candidates as they begin the hiring process.”
Diversifying our staff and journalism
In 2021, STAT received funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to establish the Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellowship in remembrance of the late science journalist who worked at STAT before her passing. The Begley fellowship is a yearlong program intended for early-career U.S. journalists from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in science journalism. The fellowship is a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s prestigious Knight Science Journalism program. STAT has had three Begley fellows: Ambar Castillo, Brittany Trang, and Isabella Cueto, who was hired as STAT’s first chronic disease reporter.
We also recruit at career fairs hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Asian American Journalists Association, and send employees to these conferences for professional development.
STAT uses the advice and services of a paid DEI consultant, Carol Fulp, and has had an employee-run Diversity and Inclusion Committee since 2020. This group of about a dozen volunteers meets twice a month, and is tasked with helping STAT create a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
In 2022, the D&I Committee helped facilitate newsroom-wide training programs. This year, the committee’s projects include: the creation of employee resource groups (ERGs), streamlining STAT’s hiring process, gathering more robust data on source diversity in stories, and publishing this report, among other initiatives.
Diversifying our sources
STAT’s newsroom has implemented a source survey to better measure and track the diversity of sources we quote in our reporting. Reporters are encouraged to send out the optional survey to their sources after publishing their stories. The source survey data, which includes self-reported information such as race/ethnicity and gender, is used internally as a tool to understand who is most often quoted in STAT and where there may be gaps in our coverage.
Diversifying our events
STAT is committed to diversity and inclusion at its live journalism events. Panels for our virtual and in-person events are carefully curated to showcase a variety of perspectives. We often include patient testimonials and panelists from groups that are underrepresented in pharma, biotech, medicine, and the life sciences. Since 2019, the events team has kept internal data on the gender and racial/ethnic diversity of speakers and moderators at its virtual and in-person events. In 2023, the events team implemented an optional survey that we send to speakers so that we can collect robust, self-reported demographics data.
Celebrating leaders who build community
In 2022, STAT launched its inaugural STATUS List, the most definitive accounting of leaders and influencers in the life sciences. The judges put particular weight on including nominees who open doors for underrepresented people and oversee programming that enhances diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Telling the stories of underrepresented voices
Health equity is at the core of STAT’s coverage of everything from health tech to biotech. Reporters and contributors often tackle issues of racial- and gender-based discrimination in academia, medicine, and the life sciences. This bold journalism continuously garners STAT recognition:
In 2023, two STAT reporters won the American Association for Cancer Research’s 2023 June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism in the category of multimedia/online journalism.
- Angus Chen’s story, “The trust-builder: a cancer center director’s try-it-all strategy for breaking the barriers between research and Black patients”
- Nicholas St. Fleur’s story, “Chadwick Boseman’s tragedy is America’s tragedy: In colorectal cancer hot spots, young men are dying at higher rates”
In 2022, STAT received various honors for its coverage of race-related health issues.
- Usha Lee McFarling won first place in beat reporting by the Association of Health Care Journalists Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism for her reporting on health disparities and structural racism in medicine.
- Eric Boodman was recognized with the national Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in writing for his story, “How medicine erased Black women from a ‘white man’s disease.’”
- STAT’s health equity podcast, Color Code, won first place in the podcast category of the WAN-IFRA North American Digital Media Awards; finalist for the Editor & Publisher EPPY Awards.
- Freelance photographer Bethany Mollenkof’s six-month photo project, “DISTANCED: Pandemic stories of Black life in the rural South,” won an EPPY Award and was a finalist for the ASME Awards for Photography and Illustration, and for the Scripps Howard Awards.
This coverage goes beyond honors and awards and is seen constantly throughout our reporting. A few examples seen over the past year are Isabella Cueto and Lacey Lyons story on the barriers to reproductive care for those with disabilities, Mohana Ravindranath’s story on technology and pregnancy care for low-income patients, Jason Mast’s story on the new drugs for sickle cell disease, and Theresa Gaffney’s story on how the end of Covid public health emergency poses obstacles for trans health care. Furthermore, in 2022 STAT published its first Spanish-language feature stories, written by Usha Lee McFarling and translated by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Translation Center.
Committing to an accessible product
In 2021, the Perkins School for the Blind conducted an accessibility audit of our website. This audit pinpointed specific areas of improvement, including color contrast recommendations, improving interactive behaviors for screen readers, and coding practices for accessibility. We’re continuously assessing our design and code to ensure that it meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but have made large improvements since this audit.
Across the site, we have made changes to improve the user experience for people with screen readers, by adding more descriptive alt text, ensuring that the code written supports screen readers, and that all user interactives can be performed without a cursor. We’ve introduced color contrast audits into our design process to ensure that all text on site provides sufficient contrast and is accessible to users. We recently introduced our new brand color to provide a more accessible experience for all users. These are only a few out of hundreds of changes we’ve made since the audit, and we look forward to continuing to improve our product to be optimal for all users.
Note from Rick Berke, Executive Editor and Co-Founder
“I am grateful to the staff at STAT for pushing us to be the most diverse media company focusing on health and life sciences, both in our staff and our journalism. In 2019, a groundswell from our journalists to bring more diversity to our public events led us in January 2020 to hire the DEI consultant Carol Fulp, whose firm produced a report based on interviews across the company on how we could make more progress on diversity, inclusion, and culture. The Fulp report concluded that the staff has “very high expectations” when it comes to D&I and set out several goals.
We’ve tried our best to meet those goals, even as we’ve learned that building an inclusive and diverse culture takes considerable patience, commitment, and passion.
That initial report led to the establishment of a STAT D&I Committee that has spurred significant accomplishments. As noted in this report, since 2015, the percentage of STAT staff who are people of color increased from 15% to 31%. Such progress is at the heart of why STAT is a thriving enterprise where people want to work.
Some of the encouraging data were not included in the metrics used for this report. We’re grateful, for instance, for the leadership of Linda Henry, who is at the top of our organizational structure and who, among other accomplishments, is engaged in workforce issues related to increasing access to quality and affordable childcare. STAT also has robust representation from the LGBTQ community, including myself.
This is, of course, an ongoing process where we continue to strive to do more. This report is a vital step to document our progress and challenges, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable in our goal to be a leader in diversity, inclusion, and creating a culture where everyone feels they belong.”
Comparison with Peer Media Organizations
STAT (2023)
- All Staff Gender: 61% Female, 39% Male
- All Staff Race/Ethnicity: 69% non-Hispanic White, 12% Asian, 9% Black or African American, 9% Latino, 2% two or more
- Management Gender: 60% Female, 40% Male;
- Management Race/Ethnicity: 80% non-Hispanic White, 20% People of Color
Axios (2022)
- All Staff Gender: 60% Female, 38% Male
- All Staff Race/Ethnicity: 60% White, 11% Asian, 10% Black or African American, 5% Hispanic or Latino, 11% two or other
- *No leadership data shared. Some data was not easily discernible from the graphs provided.
ProPublica (2023)
- All Staff Gender: 51% Female, 45% Male, 2% Other, 1% Nonbinary/Transgender 1% Do not wish to provide
- All Staff Race/Ethnicity: 59% non-Hispanic White, 10% Latino, 8% Black, 8% East Asian or Asian American, 7% Two or More, 3% Middle Eastern or Arab American; 3% South Asian or Indian American; 1% Native American or Alaskan Native; 1% Other, 1% Do not wish to specify
- Managers Gender: 50% Female, 48% Male, 2% Do Not Wish to Identify, 0% Nonbinary/Transgender, 0% Other
- Managers Race/Ethnicity: 68% non-Hispanic White, 13% Black, 11% Latino/a/x or Hispanic, 2% East Asian or Asian American, 2% Middle Eastern or Arab American, 2% two or more, 2% do not wish to specify, 0% South Asian or Indian American, 0% Native American or Alaska Native, 0% Other
The Atlantic (2022)
- All staff Gender: 61% Female, 38% Male, 1% Did not disclose
- All staff Race/Ethnicity: 64% non-Hispanic White, 12% Asian, 10% Black or African American, 7% Hispanic or Latino, 4% two or other, 0% Native Islander
- Executive Staff Gender: 57% Female, 44% Male; Senior Staff: 60% Female, 40% Male
- Executive Staff Race/Ethnicity: 78% White, 9% Asian, 4% Black or African American, 9% Hispanic or Latino Senior Staff: 75% White, 7% Asian, 8% Black or African American, 3% Hispanic or Latino, 4% Two or More, 0% Native Islander, 3% Did not disclose
The New York Times (2023)
- All Staff Gender: 55% Women, 45% Men, <1% Nonbinary
- All Staff Race/Ethnicity: 60% non-Hispanic White, 15% Asian, 10% Black, 8% Hispanic or Latino, 4% multiracial, <1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, <1% Native American
- Leadership Gender: 54% Women, 46% Men, <1% Nonbinary
- Leadership Race/Ethnicity: 69% White, 14% Asian, 8% Black, 5% Hispanic or Latino, 2% Multiracial, <1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, <1% Native American 3% did not disclose
The Washington Post (2022)
- All staff Gender: 44.9% Female, 54.5% Male
- All staff Race/Ethnicity: 55.2% White, 17.8% Black or African American, 12.2% Asian, 6.5% Hispanic or Latino, 2.8% Multiracial, 0.2% Native American, <1 Native Hawaiian Or Pacific Islander, Did not disclose 5.2%
- Leadership Gender: 47.0% Female, 52.8% Male, 0.2% did not disclose
- Leadership Race/Ethnicity: 64.3% White, 15.5% Black or African American, 8.6% Asian, 5.8% Hispanic or Latino, 2.2% Multiracial, 0.2% Native American, 0% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 3.4% did not disclose
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Nicholas St. Fleur and Julia Bujalski co-chair the committee made up of staff from both the newsroom and non-editorial sections: Julia Baker, Ambar Castillo, Rachel Cohrs, Isabella Cueto, Nohely Flores, Theresa Gaffney, Edlyn Gulama, Jason Heathcote, Erin Mershon, Rose Montera, Katie Palmer, Alexander Spinelli, Brittany Trang, and Britt Whitmore.