‘I can’t find any men to hire’: chief marketing officer
Gender diversity in adland was once again in the spotlight during an Ad Tech leadership panel, but while one panel member contended she left agencies because of a lack of opportunities for women, HCF’s chief marketing officer argued it’s actually impossible to hire men in marketing.
Jenny Williams, HCF CMO, said she’s trying to hire men
During the Leadership Panel moderated by David Koch, eHarmony’s marketing director Nicole McInnes – who has spent time at Pandora, AdShel, Ogilvy & Mather, American Express and AAPT – said creative agencies were lagging behind in offering opportunities to women.
“I left advertising because I was a female creative and I could see really clearly that I could never progress and it was obvious,” she said. “I didn’t get too bitter. I’m over it. I’m fine… but it didn’t change for 10 years.
“Maybe it’s changing now, but the creative part of advertising is probably the worst.”
McInnes conceded there may be more women in marketing than men, but noted it’s “pretty interesting” there are far more male CMOs and c-level execs.
HCF’s chief marketing officer Jenny Williams, however, was quick to argue Australia’s cultural and gender diversity is increasingly represented both in board rooms and in the work brands and agencies are producing.
If anything, she said, she’s struggling to bring men on board.
“Actually there’s a lot more women in marketing I reckon. I’ve been trying to hire men, but I just can’t find them. Sorry guys,” Williams told the panel.
Williams however warned of the dangers of ‘tokenism’ in trying to achieve a balanced workforce and using those in the minority as inspiration.
“I think having employees of different backgrounds is interesting and adds to the cosmopolitan nature of an agency, but I think the only challenge to get there is: What’s a statistically relevant opinion? So if, for example, you happen to have one Chinese person in the room and you’re trying to think up a campaign for Chinese people, then all of a sudden they become the expert – when in reality they’re one individual representing an incredibly large body of cultural diversity in Australia and they may or may not actually have a relevant opinion.”
Stewart Gurney, national head of strategy at PHD said the creative and media industries were increasingly waking up to the benefits of having a diverse workforce but conceded “we’re nowhere near there”.
she’s correct but.. most agencies dont even have * one * person in the room at the time when decisions are made on campaigns etc.. lots of homogenous white people though
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I tried to reach out to Jenny at HCF to thank her for an amazing presentation I saw at CX Disrupt. I thanked her via LinkedIn – at no stage did she even come back and acknowledge my attempt at reaching out. As a male in the marketing space. I am constantly innovating and improving my skill set so to have Jenny say she ‘can’t find any men’ – well, she’s clearly not even looking properly.
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Sounds like those 10 years really took their toll… Are you sure you’re over it?
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Are you allowed to say ‘I’m trying to hire men’? Isn’t that reverse sexism?
Shouldn’t you just be looking for the right person for the job whatever gender?
And Nicole, I know plenty of female creatives and with respect, is it possible that maybe you weren’t that good at being creative and that is what was holding you back? You seem to have done well for yourself in other areas of marketing so maybe that was your calling. There’s no need to beat up the male dominated creative departments, they are under enough pressure to perform as it is with ever increasing expectations with tighter and tighter budget constraints. In fact, talking as a creative, I actually envy that you made the leap in to Marketing on client side because the ‘Creative Dept’ doesn’t hold the same attraction that it did 10 years ago and more and from what I’ve witnessed marketing departments/clients are revelling (still) in beating up the agencies.
Unlike other job roles in advertising and marketing where people can just sit tight for a year, not rock any boats and wait for a newly invented job title to be offered with the word ‘Director’, ‘Senior’ or ‘Vice’ in it, (which incidentally seems to have replaced a salary increase which means more and more inexperienced people are getting in to senior positions and making poor and uneducated decisions, but that’s for another article), you don’t progress further as a creative unless you are good at what you do and have something physical to show for it.
And being good at what you do as a creative is rarely measured on sales results which makes what creatives do even harder to measure.
As a creative, if I was to say I’d worked on the Nike account I’d be asked to show what I created. As an advertising executive or marketing person I would just have to list my job role and responsibilities and possibly make up a few muddied sales results.
None of this has anything to do with gender, but actual physical, tangible ability and maybe the fact that 75% of creatives are male and 70% of marketing or client facing roles are women is because that is what they are best suited to based on the role and requirements of the job.
When is this dull conversation about gender equality going to stop and when can we just start discussing how to do better work and achieve better results?
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Some people make the effort, some make excuses.
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i’m afraid that the gender ‘diversity’ discussion has fostered one of the greatest example of ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ in modern Australia…. take for example the finding cited above that “women make up just a quarter of creatives in agencies but 70% of client-facing roles… Communications Council figures claim women make up just 13.5% of senior positions”.
As any first-year statistics undergrad can tell you, it’s utterly meaningless, and indeed, misleading, to cite only these numbers as indicative of a bias issue.
Anyone who contends that there’s a bias problem because, for example, women comprise, say, 50% of graduate roles but only 13.5% of senior positions should quite frankly be denied a voice in this discussion until they pass Year 10 algebra. It’s kind of like saying A=2B and G/12=Z, therefore A=Z. i.e. there’s a bunch of stuff happening in the middle that you know nothing about.
Veracity of the research methodologies aside, such stats prove absolutely nothing when it comes to gender discrimination. They only raise a flag that an issue may exist, but a lot more investigation and data is required.
The biggest missing piece is an analysis of the impact of personal CHOICE (rarely gets spoken about in today’s society), second to which is an analysis of candidate COMPETENCY. The third is empirically-identified GENDER PREFERENCES. These critical factors get swept aside by protagonists’ innately biased gender-related assumptions. e.g. the % of women who apply for creative positions is always greater than the % of women who hold such positions
Using the ‘data’ referred to above, what if 70% of total applicants for client-facing roles were women? would the fact that 70% of client-facing roles are occupied by women be a problem then?
Flipping this on its head, what if 50% of total applicants for client-facing roles were men (a ‘reasonable’ assumption according to the deeply flawed logic often employed in this debate)? does this mean that there’s gender-bias operating in favour of women because they have 70% of the roles yet were only 50% of the applicants?
My point is:- without understanding people’s choices and competencies between the time they enter ANY industry to when they’re breathing the rarified air of an exalted senior position, no evidence-based conclusion can be drawn.
My final example: men comprise 95%+ of all public company CEOs. I am a man. I stand a ZERO% chance of becoming a public company CEO – simply because i don’t want to be one, don’t care to learn nor practice the competencies required to be one, don’t want to work the lengthy hours required to be one, and so won’t be applying to become one…and you can bet that nobody is going to tap me on the shoulder and hand it to me on a platter.
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On the broader points I agree with you, but I have to say there’s no such thing as reverse sexism. You can’t be reverse sexist any more than you can reverse point. That’s just regular pointing in a different direction.
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This conversation will start being about better work when you stop using gender as a pre-requisite for skill and talent. From your very keyboard, “maybe the fact that 75% of creatives are male and 70% of marketing or client facing roles are women is because that is what they are best suited to based on the role and requirements of the job.”
Don’t preach that none of it has to do with gender when you try and use stats like these as some sort of flimsy proof for your argument. All it proves is that it’s skewed. And sorry that this problem is all so dull for you – maybe you should spend less time reading and commenting on articles that don’t interest you, and you won’t be so tired?
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Well said, thank you!
It’s time to either a) stop whining or b) grow up and respond to actual reasoning based on facts, such as the above comment.
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Vivienne/Tim/Mum staff
have you published the Comms Council Figures quoted and the sample size they used for their research before?
Of course ‘senior positions’ is too vague to be definitive without clarification, but 13.5% seems way too low for creative agencies,
I’d love a link if possible – thanks
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I’ve said this before, this is no place for such a reasoned argument, Sventana. Keep that sort of logic to yourself thank you.
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+1 for Sventana and Really tired creative.
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Hi Nick,
Thanks for your interest.
Miranda’s initial story about the Comms Council figures can be found here:
https://mumbrella.com.au/industry-mad-men-women-numbers-228287
115 agencies were surveyed across 81 positions.
There was a follow-up opinion piece, which can be found here:
https://mumbrella.com.au/mad-men-industry-attracting-retaining-women-228326
Thanks for your interest in the story,
Vivienne – Mumbrella
thank you – that’s my bedtime reading sorted!
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“I didn’t get too bitter. I’m over it. I’m fine…”
Please, please stop saying the same thing over and over again. It’s killing me softly.
Find a new chapter, or just a verse even.
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Hi Female Creative, actually I agree with you that a lot of these job divisions have a lot to do with gender but not in the way you think.
There’s two big mistakes in this whole workplace gender debate
1) is this never ending focus on “equality” than men and women are equal. Its a ridiculous assertion – I’ll come back to this
2) is the focus on trying to socially engineer an outcome that one small group in our society believes is best for everyone, men and women. Social engineering has a dismal history of failure.
In terms of equality clearly men and women are not equal they are different and I would argue complementary. In fact the most female friendly places in the world have beautifully illustrated this. The Scandinavian countries are universally regarded as having the most female friendly workplaces in the world. The barriers to women pursuing whatever career they want have been flattened out more than any other places in the world. In a brilliant case of “unintended consequences” they also have a workplace that is more segregated along gender lines than most other places in the world – because barriers have been flattened out women are FREE TO CHOOSE whatever they want and guess what they choose – roles traditionally regarded as female dominated. Biological differences are free to express themselves.
Ironically by focusing on an outcome a small group of women are trying to push their sisters into roles and careers they may not actually want to pursue.
The sooner we all move on from this obsession with equality and socially engineering outcomes the better we’ll be. Better to focus on getting rid of whatever barriers still exist to women being free to choose the career they want. Then let the outcome take care of itself.
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Diversity for sure does not exist in Marketing. People of certain background as labelled as “Technical”. Why is this? I do not see any senior or mid range managers in Marketing from Diverse community. At least not in the places I have worked so far (about 18 years in Australia).
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Always terrifically enlightening to hear the views of the least marginalised. Tokenism is what this industry operates on – lots of back slapping for tokenistic, harmful examples of creativity. You are not winning because you aren’t listening.
Also enough with the false equivalence. Its getting tired.
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