Women in Advertising & Communications Leadership (WACL) has today launched ‘The 50%’ – a new campaign to support its mission to achieve 50 per cent of CEO roles in advertising and communications filled by women, and for those women to proportionally represent the full diversity of British society.
Based on the current rate of change, women won’t hold 50% of CEO positions until 2060, a statistic that feels all the more unacceptable as WACL celebrates its centenary year in 2023.
So, WACL is asking leaders across the advertising, marketing and communications industry to step up and #MeasureWithMeaning: encouraging and empowering those in positions of leadership and influence to take a meaningful and transparent view on where they are on the journey to 50%, and commit to continuing to do so as they work to get there.
WACL said that this will, In turn, build momentum through better representation of women in adland and the communications it creates, to improve the representation of women in all walks of life.
At the heart of the call to Measure With Meaning is a mandate for leaders across the industry to provide clarity about their organisation’s progress on the journey to equal representation.
In support of this mission, WACL has produced The 50% CEO Playbook – a practical roadmap for organisations to use, that details five levers of change to help achieve the 50% representation target., including:
- Change the language of leadership
- Promote for potential
- Be a women’s health hero
- Be flexible first
- Work like the world is watching
Actions for each lever start with building data by measuring meaningfully. Understanding the data in a specific organisation is essential to changes in reality, clarity about the actions to take, and transparency to adequately measure progress, said the organisation.
Also detailed in the Playbook are case studies detailing how leading organisations – Channel4, Grey, Conker, PepsiCo, Dark Horses, Diageo, Pablo, Publicis Media, Sky, Quiet Storm, Tesco and Vodafone – have achieved positive steps towards gender parity.
Rania Robinson, WACL President and Quiet Storm CEO, says: “Although 70% of the advertising industry’s junior manager cohort are women, IPA and AA surveys show that women take only 37.5% to 39% of C-suite level roles. Compared with the situation before, this is progress. But it’s not enough.
“The five levers we set out in the 50% Playbook are by no means the only factors affecting equality. However, evidence suggests that addressing them will have a significant impact.
Each generation wants the next to have more opportunities, not less, and do better, not worse. Failure to act now will deliver a worse future, not an improved one.
Agencies are being urged to join the #50%mission and commit to #MeasureWithMeaning by downloading the playbook from WACL.info, turning the advice into positive action to drive change and contributing to what WACL hopes will become an industry knowledge bank of best practice.
