Commentary
Despite Outpouring Of Support On International Women's Day, Ad Industry Still Not Doing Enough
- by Richard Whitman , Columnist, March 9, 2017
International Women's Day saw an explosion of activity in support of all things women from the likes of Facebook, Omnicom and Puma. We also saw the launch of an app called Manterruption. Created by BETC Sao Paolo, the app is designed to listen in on conversations and identify when a man is interrupting a woman.
Alas, this flurry of activity is not enough, according to industry activist Cindy Gallop, who told Campaign: "We are seeing virtually zero change" and that agencies are still not doing enough to foster
gender equality. Gallop added, "Stop talking about it, start doing it. I want every agency and client company to implement highly strategic, highly creative work to make itself gender-equal and
diverse. After all, we’re meant to be highly strategic and highly creative about driving better client business results, so why not the same effort and impact for gender equality?"
One woman is taking steps in a direction toward which Gallop would approve. Ali Hanan is CEO of Creative Equals, an organization which aims to help
agencies, recruiters and the advertising industry in general to aspire
to achieving a 50/50 male/female ratio across all departments and levels within those departments.
Of the
efforts, Hanan said, “Intermediaries like AAR [an agency search firm] and Oystercatchers [UK-based marketing consultancy] now recognize Creative Equals’ kitemark [a UK product and service
quality
certification] as a gender-equality benchmark, which means those who are certified will stand out over competitors. With the kitemark comes a plan for an agency to go 50/50 gender split
across creative departments over a set time. This is about long-term structural change. And that’s what really moves the story on."
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When I got into the agency business women were mainly secretaries and, much less often had low paying jobs such as spot TV time buyer or assistant copywriter. While the current situation may not be perfect in the sense that women hold exactly 51% of the jobs at every level or that every woman gets paid exactly the same as every man, regardless of her age, experience or ability, tremendous progress has been made and it should be recognized. By all means, let's strive for more gender equality. No one who is fair minded should disagree with that. But beating up the entire agency business on this score is really unfair. Like the media and advertisers, the agencies have problems to deal with---all heavily covered in Media Post. If we want to make gender equality a major issue, let's take a look at the media or advertisers in this regard. If we do, we probably wont like what we see.