Women in advertising are fighting for fairness.
Did you know that 70% of young female creatives say they have never worked with a female creative director or executive creative director? With so few mentors within the business, young female creatives don’t receive the right skills, advice or tools to help them succeed.
Nicola Kemp, the trends editor at Campaign is advocating for unmasking the ugly truths about sexism in the advertising workplace.
All too often business leaders have been guilty of appropriating the language of inclusivity and feminism while steadfastly maintaining the status quo. This disconnection between word and deed has been highlighted by the flurry of jargon and obfuscation surrounding recent gender-pay gap reporting.
Take the disparity between J Walter Thompson’s “Fuck the gender pay gap” campaign and its own fucking huge gender pay gap or the revelation that “Because you’re worth it” perhaps doesn’t apply to women who work at L’Oréal UK (who earn a third less than their male colleagues). The gulf between rhetoric and reality is a reminder that businesses and their leaders are not always as progressive as they claim, or believe themselves to be.
The L’Oréal UK issue is emblematic. On average, female workers’ bonus pay at the company was less than half of that of the organization’s male staff, with women taking home 56.7% less in rewards.
Campaign reports that WPP reported a group median pay gap of 14.6% across its 14,000 employees, better than the equivalent national UK figure of 18.4%. Of their agencies, the one with the worst median pay gap was J Walter Thompson at 44.7%.
Abuse and professional disrespect can take many forms, but paying women a fraction of what the men on the team earn is the ultimate workplace dis’.
Did you know that a decade of slow but steady progress on improving parity between the sexes came to a halt in 2017, with the global gender gap widening for the first time since the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report was first published in 2006?
This is a trend in need of a radical reversal.
