• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, January 26, 2016

Well this is awesome. And something Cindy Gallop will love! A Tumblr blog called Too Many Guys, One Girl (riffing off you know what) features images of agency people winning awards, posing for office photos and other situations. In every image, it's, literally, all guys and one women or, in some cases, all guys. 

The site has been up for at least six months but seems to be rising in popularity of late with the ever increasing focus on gender imbalance both in advertising, itself, and in the agencies where that advertising is created. Granted, there are many women working in advertising but it's slim picking the higher you go up in the ranks.  

The site was created anonymously but its creator told Metro UK, "I used to work at an agency and they took a few of us out to Cannes last year. It was my first time and I was lucky enough to be given a delegates pass to see all the talks and award ceremonies. I began to notice the huge lack of diversity among those who had collected the trophies on stage. There were so few women sharing the stage, it really affected me and I found it increasingly more uncomfortable. I made the Tumblr to begin calling out the awful ratio the majority of agencies were unashamedly promoting."

Of the images posted to the site, the creator added, "If you look through Facebook albums of advertising award ceremonies, they photograph like it was a stag party. It’s really gross. Once I began collating these images, it’s all I saw everywhere. 

On the reaction agencies had to the site, the creator added, “The response I received back from them just annoyed me more because they treated my Tumblr with the same passiveness that creates this dynamic in the first place. Agencies should jump at the opportunity to be at the forefront of tackling this glaringly obvious problem and yet they sit back and continue to hire women into account management roles and men into the creative department.” 

Yes, the issue is as old and as challenging as the issue of diversity within advertising. There have been endless screeds written on the topic, associations created and diversity managers hired. There's even a conference, The 3 Percent Conference, dedicated to the topic. And yet, it's more of the same year after year.