Podcasts
One of the most original Australian podcasts of recent years, Pearl Tan’s award-winning Diversity Work is a savagely funny look at institutional racism. By Louisa Lim.
Diversity Work unpicks the mathematics of racism
An improvised autofiction podcast about racism may not immediately sound like a winner, but an ambitious Australian show by a first-time podcaster has been cleaning up at national and international awards. Diversity Work is one of the most original Australian podcasts to emerge in recent years, both in genre and its unique production methods.
The premise of Diversity Work is that a white executive at a television channel accused of racism boasts he has a show in development that ticks all the diversity boxes at once. When his bluff is called, 10 diverse creatives are hastily convened to conjure up the pilot. The ensuing cringe comedy charts their struggles with the fictional Channel 8, reaching Ricky Gervais in The Office levels of visceral discomfort, while also being savagely funny.
“Most people make a little face when they talk to me about it,” says actor and director Pearl Tan, gritting her teeth to pull a cringe face. Diversity Work is the first foray into podcasting for Tan, who teaches directing at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
The podcast takes listeners inside the box-ticking writers’ room, where 10 creatives from First Nations, disabled, LGBTQIA+ and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are trying to develop their box-ticking pilot. Tan plays Toni Lee, a development executive from “Fakehaus Pictures” who has assembled the team, a role not far removed from real life.
In fact, she brought the cast together using her own networks and by advertising on Facebook and LinkedIn. Each cast member was told to develop a character based on their lived experience. This autofictionalisation allowed participants to draw upon incidents of racism they had faced in the industry without going public and burning their bridges.
The tone of the podcast is set in the first three minutes, when a character botches the Acknowledgment of Country. But the real action begins when the network plunges the room into a digital blackface scandal by photoshopping the publicity photo to change the skin colour of some members of the group. That sets the scene for a week of escalating missteps including a divisive live radio interview, a gag order from the network and an open letter criticising the group.
Along the way, the fly-on-the-wall technique allows listeners to eavesdrop on the writers’ earnest discussions as they attempt to navigate each new crisis. In this way, we witness the emotional labour borne by the group as they weigh up the cost of each choice.
Tan is aiming to force listeners to experience the mathematics of racism, where every reaction – even to a microaggression – carries personal and professional consequences. “Any response will cost you,” she says. “If you ignore it, it costs you. If you laugh it off, it costs you. If you choose to confront it by calling someone in, it costs you. If you choose to confront it by calling someone out, it costs you.”
Ultimately the writers’ pilot ends up being green-lit but with a series of conditions that undermines its most cherished tenets. The network executives – led by the accurately named Steve White, who is mentioned in godlike tones but never actually appears – instruct them to make the lead character a gay white man. They are told to ensure “the characters have just one type of diverse identity so it’s not confusing”. The writers’ losing battle is mirrored by their diminishing visibility. They start their week in a swanky glass boardroom above the Channel 8 studios. Every day their location is downgraded until they end the week in a dusty, unused room because no one remembered to book a space.
As a listening experience, Diversity Work is not necessarily easy. It manages to be awkward, confronting, enraging and bitterly funny, but the discomfort serves a purpose. “It is a bit confusing, because it does blur genre lines,” Tan admits. “In some ways it’s fiction, but it sounds like nonfiction. It’s not intended to be a mockumentary or satire. It really is truth-telling.”
Although Diversity Work was released in 2023, it is enjoying a second bump since winning a clutch of prestigious awards including a Silver Trophy for Innovation at the New York Festivals Radio Awards, three Signal Awards and two coveted Webby Awards, including a People’s Voice award. Last year, Tan took the Rising Star category at the Australian Podcast Awards.
The podcast is the creative component of Tan’s six-year-long PhD on diversity on Australian screens. She envisioned Diversity Work as a collective and creative complaint, inspired by the work of British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed who posits that complaint can be used as a collective act of resistance.
In order to ensure ethical practice, Tan designed a highly unusual production process. After the cast members had developed their characters, they were given “script blueprints” laying out specific scenarios and told to figure out how their characters would respond. During two days of workshops, they improvised performances in takes that sometimes lasted for more than an hour. This produced six hours of raw audio, from which Tan shaped the podcast.
The process was designed to ensure that each of Tan’s collaborators kept creative control over their words, dialogue and how they interacted with each other. Her painstaking method also included sharing edits with each collaborator and acting on every piece of feedback to ensure co-creation. Tan says these procedures would prevent the work from being funded through traditional channels, which require pre-production scripts.
This was one of the considerations that led Tan to choose the podcast medium for this particular project, although she had never made a podcast before. “It’s fighting against the form,” Tan said. “It’s critiquing screen and screen language. Very often you see that in order to put something on screen, you have to replicate the thing you’re critiquing in order to critique it, and it’s pretty challenging.”
The result is layered and complex, illustrating how white-run institutions co-opt diverse staff members, while exploring the blurred line between performing diversity work and actually doing it.
Each episode ends with a short credo on diversity work. In theory these could sound cloyingly earnest, but for me they often landed with a sickening thud of recognition. It was often a relief to hear these shared experiences articulated: “Diversity work is behind the scenes and not just on screen. Diversity work is being asked to do impossible tasks. Diversity work is being told that your mere presence as a person from a diverse background means there are no other diversity problems.”
Tan says audience reaction has varied wildly. “Some people binged it because they really enjoyed the truth of it and the humour and ridiculousness. And others say to me that they found it quite confronting and so close to home that they had to take breaks.”
It was only after finishing the podcast that I realised it did not contain a single male voice, not even that of the godlike Steve White. Ultimately, the Diversity Work had all been done by people from the most marginalised backgrounds.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "Ticking the boxes".
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