Imagine that you are applying for a job at a business firm that you are very excited about. You sit down and complete the interview, and you can tell that you were denied. Nobody outright said it, but you know it was because of your skin color. You were referred to a lower paid and less exciting part of the firm. You had no other choice but to take the offer.

That is a quick analogy that summarizes skin tone representation in Forbes. The articles do not have a lot of representation, so they resort to forcing representation in their advertisements, which less people care about. It is humiliating, degrading, condescending, and downright immoral. In this article, I will go over why this is happening and why this practice relates to business.

Seen above: Categorical data which my group gathered using a google colab program (DiPietro)

After gathering skin tones from prominent figures in the August 3, 2021 edition of Forbes, we can obviously see that lighter skin tones are favored. However, I discovered something that I didn’t exactly expect. While the articles are overwhelmingly pale, the advertisements have a little more diversity (albeit not a ton).

But why is this? There could be many reasons, but I have a few ideas. Perhaps the articles are kept pale because they focus on very rich and powerful people, and they tend to be lighter-skinned (which is a whole other issue). Other magazines might not care as much, but since Forbes is a business/finance magazine, they probably put a lot of care into choosing who they talk about. This could also be why there is more representation in advertisements, as unnamed models or actors don’t hold as much status.

Going off of the previous theory, it is possible that advertisements have more representation than articles because the people in them do not have to have any prerequisites or be financial gurus. Building off of this, we could also theorize that since advertisements come from a third party, Forbes doesn’t put as much effort into screening them.

This data collection was nowhere close to perfect. The sample size was relatively small, the program we used to collect skin tone (something in google colab combined with CODAP) was prone to human error, and we may have missed some skin tone examples. However, as it is, I feel that what we have gathered is still very useful

Overall, Forbes puts a lot more love into their articles, which have paler skin tones. They try to make up for their lack of representation by putting a little bit more diversity in their advertisements, but the status of ads is far below that of articles. This issue is not unique to Forbes, but the specific reasons may be.

Works Cited

Prince, Michael, “Deal of the Century”, Forbes, August 16th, 2021, drive.google.com/file/d/1caZMsvP2OJFOnvUdUD8HBxbigh0Qes3a/view. 

Forbes, 01 August 2021, drive.google.com/file/d/1caZMsvP2OJFOnvUdUD8HBxbigh0Qes3a/view. Accessed 2 Feb. 2022.