Gender balance steadily tipping toward women

International Women’s Day will remain a conflicted occasion: recognition of real progress, offset with a dose of pragmatic honesty about the context, fragility and glacial pace of global change. But real structural and lasting change must come from those in a position of power and influence.

Hannah Sturrock is head of national engagement at Advertising Council Australia

Sometimes to chart progress on gender equality, it’s useful to be reminded of how dysfunctional things were in the “bad old days”.

“It’s not clear to me which women, if any, he listened to.”

“I don’t think he ever really valued women’s perspectives.”

“They smashed her, they didn’t just break her, they smashed her. And it was predatory in the way they did it.”

Three choice quotes from the morbidly fascinating ABC documentary, Nemesis, spoken by Australian politicians as they pick over the legacy of the nine-year Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments. In this case, the “bad old days” were only a few years ago.

While all three episodes featured a cornucopia of betrayals, public shaming and delusional power moves, the undercurrent of this decade in politics was gender.

As a viewer, the absence of women at the top of our political system was shockingly obvious but it didn’t appear to worry those in charge at the time. They were too busy wrestling with each other.

When the series ends with an uprising – also known as the 2022 election – we’re reminded of the consequences of ignoring the fastest-growing single demographic in Australia: professional women.

In 2024, as we approach International Women’s Day, structural gender biases and norms continue to stymie progress on gender equality, not only in Australia, but around much of the globe.

In Australia, however, there has been a perceptible political and cultural shift in gender representation. The term “inflection point” is overused, particularly in advertising and marketing circles. But let’s suspend our natural cynicism for a moment, because we are in the midst of a turning point.

Australia now has women holding 45 per cent of seats across both chambers of parliament.

As of June 30, 2023, women held 51.6 per cent of reportable Australian government board ­positions, the highest rate of ­representation on record.

In business, Amanda Bardwell’s appointment to chief executive of Woolworths, joining Leah Weckert who took the top job at Coles last year, are other milestones. On the surface, their appointments indicate the “glass ceiling” may at least be weakening.

In the advertising industry, which is female-dominated but historically captained by male leaders, there is also evidence of structural change.

We may bemoan the rate of change in leadership, but it took Clemenger Group, one of Advertising Council Australia’s largest members, just three years to transform the gender make-up of its board, increasing the number of female directors from 15 per cent in 2021, to 50 per cent by the end of 2023. Its median total ­remuneration gender pay gap is just 0.7 per cent.

Across Australia’s Adland, female chief executives are also taking charge at some of the largest and most influential agencies. These include DDB, Ogilvy, TBWA\Melbourne, Havas Host, Special Group, CHEP Network, Clemenger BBDO, We Are Social, 303 MullenLowe, Big Red, WPP, Dentsu Creative, Supermassive, Innocean and, as of next week, Leo Burnett.

Looking to culture – which advertising also shapes and vice versa – women-led movements are accelerating these turning tides. Take some of the biggest cultural moments of the past 12 months for example; The Matildas, Barbie: The Movie and Taylor Swift. Each is a beacon for outstanding achievement and champions narratives that empower others. They also represent undeniable commercial value and in turn, power and influence of women in sport and entertainment. These women deserve our applause. Their successes have become tent poles for progress.

But obstacles are still lurking. In truth, these moments for women in the spotlight are often fleeting, and while some females now hold the positions, do they truly hold the power to make changes, without an even more senior male or board “marking their homework”?

Intersectional bias must also be tackled if we’re to achieve a permanent change in our gender scorecard.

Women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds spend up to eight years longer in middle management roles compared with women from Anglo or European backgrounds, and they also get paid less. The ethnic gender pay gap is double the national average.

In the advertising industry, despite being female-dominated, creative leadership roles and departments remain stubbornly unbalanced. Plenty of great female talent is out there, but the lens through which leadership qualities are defined is still gendered and the senior role models are few and far between.

And so IWD will remain a conflicted occasion: recognition of real progress, offset with a dose of pragmatic honesty about the context, fragility and glacial pace of global change. But don’t let this paradox paralyse you. Real structural and lasting change must come from those in a position of power and influence.

It is therefore only right to use this space to call out some of the women you might not have heard of – yet. This next generation of industry leaders, along with their male allies, are hard-wired to champion equality.

Look them up. Ask for their advice. Listen to their ideas. They ­really do represent the inflection point. This time it is different.

Isabel Evans, Phoebe Peralta, Charlotte Berry, Dhiv Pillai, Raina Ahmed, Phoebe Sloane, Huei Yin Wong, Charlotte Goodsir, Linh Diep, Polina Shilenina, Sophie Gallagher, Julia Stretch, Julia Spencer, Regina Stroombergen, Leah Morris, Abbie Dubin-Rhodin, Kiranpreet Kaur Dhillon, Loz Maneschi, Liana Rossi, Kiah Nicholas, Anastasia Simone.

Hannah Sturrock is national head of engagement at Advertising Council Australia