Why Should Great Female Leaders Want to Work at Your Agency?

There’s a glaring problem with gender diversity and inclusion at the top of the advertising and creative worlds. That is well documented and frequently spotlighted. But the “why” seems to be a stubborn point of contention and confusion.

Diversity has become some kind of unicorn—a fantastical creature that many talk about no one has actually seen. And rather than take the initiative to go out and find it, most people assume someone is hiding it from them. Or, worse, that it’s unachievable.

Recently, a number of highly-publicized (and rightly criticized) scenarios have managed to direct blame at the entire female population and their so-called lack of ambition. This is classic male laziness and ignorance. Unlike the elusive—but totally realistic—ambition of diversity, the notion that there are not enough women who want to be leaders is pure myth. A 2015 WorkplaceTrends survey found that more than half of millennial women have aspirations in leadership.

So, what is the problem? It’s not you, it’s me. Really.

It’s up to us, the leaders of the creative industries (read: white, middle-aged+ males), to depart from our default industry settings and find the women who want to take our businesses into the future. But it doesn’t stop, or even begin, there. We also have to build an environment worthy of that ambition.

Imagine the challenge. Women are making career progress with the odds stacked against them, and in an environment where true role models are few and internal politics rife. That makes it hard to prove the journey is worth their time, energy and insight. While men can see their ’next job’ everywhere, women have new ground to break. It’s our responsibility to cultivate an inclusive culture that champions women and treats them with respect, rather than with winks and false promises that stigmatize this industry and too many others.

So let’s take some action. Where do you stand today? If less than 50 percent of your leadership is women, do a company gut check and get real about what you’re doing—or not—to invite untapped and overlooked creative talent to your leadership team. Ask yourself very simply, why should women want to work here?

And then ask yourself these follow up questions:

Is leadership really on board with gender diversity?

There’s a difference between leaders talking about the importance of balanced teams, and those taking actionable steps toward making it a reality. Now is the time to filter out the people who aren’t willing to act.

That starts with talent acquisition. Is your senior management making an effort to recruit talent from outside the typical pool of candidates, or are they just cherry picking from their immediate circles? Even worse, are they spending their time poaching from competitors who, by the way, also have diversity issues?

At Brand Union, we’ve hired former teachers, VC analysts, and pastry chefs. We’ve hired from record labels, fashion brands, architecture, and interior design businesses. Unless we get creative on the recruiting front, the accessible talent pool is, and will continue to be, filled with men. The “boys club” of the creative world is self-perpetuating.

There needs to be a sense of urgency for creating diversity. Schedule one-on-ones with your executives to discuss the diversity picture within their individual teams. If someone is apathetic or inauthentic, weed them out. Encourage your team to be change agents, to support junior women and to create a dialogue with their peers. Groups like Token Man and Vote Run Lead can help them acquire a better understanding of the obstacles women face on a daily basis.

You should be executing on diversity strategies like you execute on an overdue client deliverable. If there’s any deadline we’ve missed in our world, it’s the diversity imperative.

Do your people receive equal pay and parental benefits?

Across all industries, the pay gap is still the most quantifiable example of institutionalized sexism. Overall, women make 79 cents for every dollar men make in the United States.

But with cold hard data to work with, it’s also the easiest to measure and act on. Make it a priority to audit your agency once a year and to pay close attention to agency-wide performance and development reviews. If you’re seeing a discrepancy in salaries across men and women, find out why, and fix it. A major contributor will likely be the gender imbalance at the top. With more executives and senior employees who are male, a high concentration of salaries and bonuses are likely to go to men.

That’s the macro problem we’re trying to solve. The micro is inequality across parallel positions, particularly in the roles of junior and support staff. If you take the time and effort to ensure there are no gaps in the foundation, you’ll be able to build—and authentically speak about—a more inclusive environment that successfully retains and acquires female talent at the top.

In the U.S., both sexes lack meaningful parental support. Women, especially, should be provided with ample maternity leave. This is something we’re working on at Brand Union, trialing experiments in a number of markets and engaging our leaders on the balance of local market nuances. It’s an issue every company should look at. A little change can make a huge difference to people going through huge changes in their lives.

Cultivating a culture of equality, respect and acceptance for staff members’ parental preferences is perhaps most important. Are you subconsciously discriminating against your employees who want to be mothers while rewarding the fathers? No one wants to admit it, but this is unfortunately commonplace. Female employees have the same rights to comfort and security in their jobs as their male colleagues.

Does your work engage in unintentional misogyny or pinkwashing?

The staff audits and team infrastructure analysis is crucial, but that stuff is rarely exposed to the world. In order to attract the best women in the industry, you have to make sure the outward-facing layer, the work you put into the world, aligns with your diversity-heralding claims.

Today’s mad women are highly intelligent, intuitive, and fierce. They’re also fed up. For decades, they’ve watched their bodies be twisted, shrink-wrapped, and scrutinized; their self-worth pinned to beauty products and fashion trends; and their sexuality shamed while simultaneously used to sell beer—all by an industry that, in 2016, still hasn’t figured out how to hire them as creative directors.

Pinkwashed campaigns that sell a watered-down version of “women's empowerment” will not fool them. In order to attract top female talent, we have to reinvent age-old creative patterns without simplifying and overpackaging third-wave feminism.

This presents a paradox, of course. As a man, I can't claim to know all the problems, nor to have the solution. But I can get involved in the discussion and state an opinion: authentic creative work can’t happen without an authentic source—the women themselves. If your roster of creative directors lacks women (my guess is that it does) include the more junior women at your agency in this conversation. What makes them feel good? When do they feel most confident? What experiences trigger the deepest, fullest expression of themselves?

Don’t follow clickbait girl power trends. Don’t fall for what Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, calls “marketplace feminism.” Follow what’s real. And if you can’t figure out what’s real, perhaps it’s best to stay out of that narrative altogether.