Female advertising icons shared their industry ‘horror stories’ and strategies to increase the retention of at-risk groups on stage at Women in Media’s national conference.
Sunita Gloster, non-executive director and moderator of the panel, opened by saying while there is a perception that things are improving, the experiences of sexism and gender discrimination unfortunately remain common.
Gloster identified mid-career women as a category of concern, with one in four middle managers in the media and marketing industry likely to leave due to a lack of inclusion.
“These results clearly show we have more work to do,” Gloster said.
“Change is also quite slow and I often say it's because the inequalities still exist in our minds.”
Melissa Hopkins, chief marketing and audience officer at Seven West Media, said in her 30 year career, inclusion has come a long way but we are nowhere near where it should be.
To encourage change, Hopkins uses radical candour in her leadership.
“I ask people around me to share when I've got a level of unconscious bias,” Hopkins said.
“I often ask the most unassuming person to do it and I think that that is really important [because] I do have an unconscious bias.
“I like designer clothes, I spend a lot of money on my hair and makeup and I'm not going to apologise about that, but I also know that that means I gravitate to certain things.
“So that's why it's important for people to call you out. I'm not perfect and that's okay.”
Kirsty Muddle, CEO at Dentsu Creative, is also a big proponent for encouraging diversity, as it helps businesses blossom creatively.
“Media and advertising have more impact on human behaviour than policy now … we have an ethical responsibility to make sure what we are putting out in the world has got a positive impact,” Muddle said.
“Fundamentally, diversity breeds original thinking, because unless you have diversity when you're creating you're just talking to your bias - you're never going to come up with anything unique.
“Diversity and inclusion have not only got massive impacts on the workplace, but on solving the biggest problems we have.”
Phoebe Sloane, senior copywriter at Clemenger BBDO and founder of The Aunties, shared ‘horror stories’ from young females in the advertising industry highlighting the need of support groups.
“We had one grad who thought the ‘free’ in ‘freelance’ meant you literally worked for free. She worked at this really tiny agency for six months completely unpaid throughout COVID - that’s totally illegal,” Sloane said.
“We’ve heard stories right up to the extreme of straight-up sexual harassment and grooming.
“So we decided to create this emergency buddy system [The Aunties] for all women across all levels in the industry.
“An auntie is someone who's not your boss, not your friend and they're not in your agency bubble, which takes away the politics and provides objective support.”
Abbie Dubin-Rhodin, senior strategy director at Special Australia, highlighted that 8% of people in media have reported experiencing sexual harassment in the last 12 months.
“There are thousands in this industry; 8% represents hundreds of people - we should be fucking rioting over that high number of people who have been sexually harassed in their workplace,” Dubin-Rhodin said.
“But we didn’t; not only did we not riot, we just continued to go to work the next day.
“That’s not to say things aren’t happening around it because things are. But ‘business as usual’ continued because we have a culture of silence.
“While silence is broken with noise, the people we expect to make noise are the people that it's happening to.
“We need to be asking leaders - the people with the wealth of power - to use that power in service of protecting people.”
For example, Dubin-Rhodin said if you’re on a jury with someone who has had disruptive behaviour, speak up and say ‘I'm not going to work on this jury with people like that’.
Another example - if your client is demonstrating inappropriate behaviour towards a junior, report that behaviour to their boss and ask to remove the person from the account.
“We need to be making big bold decisions that impact the commercial bottom line, because otherwise, it's not really going to have an impact,” Dubin-Rhodin said.
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