• by Joe Mandese , June 21, 2011

CANNES, FRANCE - A panel of some of the advertising and media industry's leading women executives have done a good job of smashing Madison Avenue's glass ceiling, but they also smashed some myths surrounding it. Acknowledging that there are -- and always have been -- some barriers to entry for women in the advertising business, they nonetheless seemed perplexed by the industry's focus on it.

"I didn't know what a glass ceiling was," said Martha Stewart, the founder and CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, arguably one of the most successful women in the media industry. "I didn't pay attention to gender differences. I didn't really think this is a man's job or a woman's job. Growing up, I really concentrated on doing the job at hand, and concentrated on focusing on what I had in front of me."

Stewart said the key to her success had less to do with her being a woman and more to do with being driven and doing a great job. She said she first observed sexual discrimination in Madison Avenue's workplace when, as a teenager going to casting calls for commercials, she was asked to show up in a bikini. When she inquired whether the spot featured women in bikinis, an ad executive told her: "'No, we just wanted to see you in bikinis.'" "I was furious," Stewart said, "and I walked out. But I got the job anyway."

"This term 'boy's club' [only] came to me a few years ago," added Carol Lam, managing director and chief creative officer of McCann-Erickson Shanghai, a division of IPG, which sponsored and produced the event at the Cannes Lions Festival. "I thought it was a strange concept," Lam said, adding that rising in the advertising business in Hong Kong and China, she "never felt discriminated being a woman."  Lam said she was surprised when Western journalists would ask her such questions.

Lam acknowledged to Soledad O'Brien, the CNN anchor who moderated the panel, that it might be unique to China, where that kind of discrimination would be viewed as a "luxury," given the paucity of talent and need to staff rapidly growing agency organizations.

"We are facing a problem of [a] shortage of talent," she explained. "To us, sexual discrimination is a luxury. It's all about talent."

Gail Heimann, vice chair of IPG's Weber Shandwick division, also dodged the discrimination issue, indicating that she got ahead in a male-dominated business simply by being driven and "defiant."

Kimberly Kadlec, worldwide vice president-global marketing group at Johnson & Johnson, said that like Stewart, she grew up unaware of sexual discrimination because both her parents were successful entrepreneurs. She first encountered it in the 1980s, while working for a Midwest company where the male executives got excused for cigarette breaks. But she said the key to her success came from mentors, many of whom were men, not women.

In fact, Kadlec indicated that it was her mentoring from men that was most helpful. She said they taught her valuable lessons in male-dominated workplaces, such as the need to be "very clear about what you want and verbalize it to people who can help you get it."

All of the executives indicated that there are some different cultural issues for female executives. Fundamentally, it came down to how much they wanted to succeed in a business where the leaders have to be driven.

Stewart seemed surprised by a statistic cited during the panel discussion that only 3% of the top creative jobs on Madison Avenue are held by women.

"It's hard for me to envision that 3% number," she said, noting that some of her best friends -- women like Wells Rich Greene Founder Mary Wells and former O&M chief Charlotte Beers -- were women.

"I was surprised about it being only 3%," she reiterated, noting that at her own company, more than 70% of the organization is female. She suggested that some of the problem may be that Madison Avenue simply has not done a good enough job of communicating to young women what a great opportunity the industry may be for them.

Weber Shandwick's Heimann actually went so far as to suggest that men are better wired for the type of creative ideas and content that Madison Avenue has valued and celebrated most.

"It is highly testosterone-driven," she said, describing it as a form of "swagger" that came more naturally to men than women. She concluded: "Creativity is swagger."

If Heimann's insight is accurate, it goes a long way toward explaining something about this festival itself. Upon introducing this morning's "Beyond Mad Men" panel, Kitty Lun, chairman-CEO of IPG's Lowe China and CEO of IPG's Women's Leadership Network, noted that of the 13 awards panels at this year's festival, only one of the jury presidents is a woman. Adding that women also comprise less than 10% of the judges, she quipped: "Women obviously have not passed the test of creativity." And she did so modestly and without any hint of swagger.