Kate Smither, AKA The Tall Planner, asks what adland can do to get to equal pay and equal representation. It might require something radical.
Blink and you would have missed it but apparently, Monday was Equal Pay Day. For most women, it is a day that serves to remind us that we are not paid equally and that at the current rate, our future is all but proverbially ****** as our super will not sustain the length of our lives. Not exactly a good news day
Each year it comes around and each year it reminds us of the lack of equality.
The rallying cry of Sunita Gloster last Friday at B&T‘s Women in Media Awards as well as those of Esther Clerehan, got me thinking… both speeches and interviews had similar rallying cries and similar themes. Both drew into sharp focus the fact that as much as has and as is being done, we’re not there yet. Like Equal Pay Day, we are in a dangerous moment where we are calling out things but not necessarily changing them.
Now, I’m not totally delusional, I know that there is no silver bullet to make everything equal in terms of representation, pay, safety, access and acceptance. But I wonder if rather than hoping for a silver bullet we need a circuit breaker. Something a bit dramatic, a bit sudden and a bit radical might force the issue.
Speaking about her Institute on Gender in Media, Geena Davis noted the same issue with the pace of change, “If nearly every sector of our society has a big gender disparity, how long is it going to take to correct that? How much time is it going to take, no matter how hard we work, until things are equal? We can’t snap our fingers and suddenly Congress is half women. How are we going to conquer the gender bias in all of us, whether it’s unconscious or conscious?”
So really the question is not whether there is equal pay or not, whether there is a pay gap or not, or whether there is even equal representation or not, I suspect we all know the answers to those questions, but maybe the question we need to ask is what is our “circuit break”? what can we as an industry do to “snap our fingers” and create dramatic change.
Geena Davis goes on to explain how her focus on changing representation in film and media became the circuit breaker – something that could be tangibly changed and can let girls see what is possible. After all, if they can see it they can be it.
Seeing the amazing and exceptional women honoured in the B&T Women in Media Awards reminded me of what my lecturer in post-modern feminist literature told us, there are as “many feminisms and there are feminists”.
It always stuck with me and looking at the list of exceptional, women made me remember that each and every one of them is a different “woman in media”.
They are all different leaders and having worked with many of them and knowing them personally, they are all very different inspirations. But maybe collectively, they are the right ones to find us our radical circuit breaker. I feel like we should collectively take the brief for a radical act that will force change and make sure that exceptional is more norm than exception.
Here’s a thought starter
Writing for the Guardian last week, Renate van der Zee explained a radical experiment undertaken by the Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands. The article outlined how far the country lagged behind the EU in female academic representation, and how despite its efforts, Eindhoven was even worse than many other institutions, So, (the reporter notes) “ The university turned to a more radical approach: making all vacancies for academic staff open only to women for six months, after which, men would be welcome to apply too. A fellowship was also created. The newly accepted scientists were given a mentor and €100,000 ($AU165,000) to set up a lab.”
The article acknowledges that the policy was challenged, unpopular and evolved over time but it also notes that it had significant results….. “In five years, the percentage of newly hired female academic staff grew from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. The number of female permanent academic staff increased from 22 per cent to 29 per cent. An evaluation also showed that employees had started to attach more importance to diversity”
Maybe radical isn’t nearly as radical as it seems.
For our industry, it might just be time to reopen the quota vs merit debate and to really understand the link between the two. Quotas can be the circuit break that forces equal access to both opportunity and ultimately merit
I pose this not as a perfect solution but as one I have come to reconsider.
I was always in the merit camp, never wanting a job just because I was female, but instead because I was good at my job and earned it. Defining me just by my gender felt like it reduced me and skipped over what I had achieved. It felt very one-dimensional and forced me to fail on the stereotypical success measure of women, which is often marked by success in having a family and a career. I had missed the having kids part of that. Even just defining merit seems hard and when you come down to it, meritocracies are fundamentally based on bias and stereotypes built on the now and the before of an industry, not for the tomorrow.
At the same time though, quotas seem inherently unfair. And article in The Conversation states “……calls for quotas are usually instantly met with the claims that they are anti-meritocratic. Particularly in Australia, merit has become synonymous with fairness, equality, or objectivity. In fact, merit-based processes operate much differently.
Discrimination is actually integral to a meritocratic system. A merit-based system “discriminates” on the basis of how much “merit” a person has – assuming the pre-condition that everyone has an equal opportunity to acquire it – and favours those who have more of it”
Essentially, even if we want to run our industry on a meritocracy we aren’t “there yet” because women and men don’t have equal access to even the chance of merit.
Quotas are often debated in politics. Getting the representation right in political parties, government and electoral candidates translates into getting the representation right sociologically too.
The Harvard International Review notes “….More than 130 nations have modified their constitutions, electoral laws, or party rules to specify a threshold of women to be selected or nominated to a political body…… Between 1995 and 2012, many countries implemented quotas globally, and one study found a correlation between quotas and women’s political representation. Women’s political representation jumped from 11 per cent to 21 per cent during that time.”
All things being equal in November 2025 we will see a similar impact in the USA once they elect their first female president this year.
So where is representation in our industry going to be in 2025, or in 2035 and what does it need to start getting there?
Quotas are one idea, especially if they are industry-agreed and monitored collectively. There are probably many many more.
Do we take an Eindhoven University of Technology approach? Or adopt blind interviews to break the conscious and unconscious bias in hiring? Do we start an industry-wide grad programme designed for women? Whatever the circuit break is, it will take the industry acting as a whole to take it from an idea to a reality. No one person, no one agency and no silver bullet can do it alone.
