Sexism in adland

The advertising industry as a whole, and particularly the creative agencies, are stereotypically notorious for Man Men style male egos, but I’m not sure it is really any different in many other industries.

Ad and media agency boards are still dominated by men (with a few notable exceptions such as Karen Blackett at MediaCom) but then so are most company boards, even given the latest FTSE board report showing female participation at board level has risen from 12.5% to 26%. This is not just an advertising or media industry issue.

There is a well-worn example from Hewlett Packard that, when it came to applying for senior management positions, women would only apply when they met 100% of the qualifications for the job, while men would apply when they met 60%.

This tellingly points not just to external factors potentially stopping women from rising to the top, but also a confidence and difference in how they perceive their current and potential abilities, which needs to be addressed.

And yet, it is not every woman’s experience in the creative industries or outside of them – there are numerous women like Karen Blackett and Cilla Snowball who have achieved, and continue to achieve, great professional heights.

In my experience, there will always be a few senior male clients who prefer to work with senior male ad executives rather than a woman, which I think can create more opportunities for men to climb the greasy pole in many agencies.

I hope this is getting less prevalent as younger men tend to be a bit more enlightened, or so I’ve seen.

I think the issue that women tend to look for more flexible working arrangements after children can potentially be a reason for them being overlooked for promotion in agencies, but this should not be the case.

In my experience, women working shorter hours tend to be more productive in the hours they are in the office, and home working has never been so easy. It comes back to the need to value diversity, as women often bring a different perspective and different strengths to men, in business leadership.

It’s short sighted to ignore the skills of half the workforce. If the advertising industry persists in giving jobs to the boys it will be all the poorer for it.

From reading the article, Kevin Roberts’ recent comments seemed to have been taken a little out of context. However, given his length of service and position, I do believe he should have known better than to make such sweeping generalisations.

Suggesting that sexual discrimination in advertising is never an issue was always going to come back and bite him.

While it is also within my experience that women, in general, care more about doing a job well rather than solely for the recognition or for ambition, that too is a sweeping statement which in no way reflects every individual woman in business or in life’s experience or ambition.

I firmly believe that we are much closer to gender parity in the workplace than ever before in the last 25 years, and not recognising this progress undermines these monumental achievements.

More women are now going to university after doing better at school than the boys. Women now account for nearly half of those employed in the advertising sector. And of those, 31% of women hold the senior executives positions with the proportion of female creative directors rising by nearly 12% in 2014.

Firstly sexism in adland is a real thing because in real life it is a real thing.

In advertising we like to assume that we work above the rest of society in a better, parallel world. We do not. We would have much more success advertising to people if we understood this. Things that affect the rest of the world also affect us.

Secondly the problem of sexism isn’t just something that men do to women. Women also do this to women.

Just because you have a female creative on an account doesn’t mean your campaign won’t be sexist. In psychology we call this unconscious bias.

Studies have shown that even I am likely to prefer a male pilot, or be more reassured if my surgeon is a man. I am a women but I’ve been brought up to expect male control and be surprised by female leadership.

So if people like Kevin Roberts slip up when they’re talking I’m not surprised. And anyway, to me it doesn’t really matter what people say.

What matters is that next time I walk into a pitch with my business partner, it isn’t assumed that I’m the account executive rather than the owner of a business simply because he’s a man and I’m a woman.