Sexism in marketing is improving but will the DE&I backlash change this?

Five years on from the release of a groundbreaking book exploring the prevalence of sneaky sexism and stereotypes in advertising, The Growth Agenda explores the industry progress as it awaits the impact of DE&I backlash.

Positive representations of women in advertising have improved over the past five years; however, as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives suffer a backlash, that could change.

The authors of Brandsplaining, a landmark data-led analysis of the stereotypes and sexism in marketing that drew from 15 years of research and a major global study, believe there has been significant progress in some areas of the industry since the book was published in 2021.

Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts, who run UK research consultancy PLH Research, told The Growth Agenda that greater governance and increased awareness from programs including the UN Unstereotype Alliance, as well as internal committees in large multinational corporations such as Unilever and L’Oreal, have helped advance the industry.

“We’ve seen lots of progress on structural and institutional progress,” Ms Roberts said.

“Here in the UK, the advertising body Advertising Standards Association has done a big piece around stereotyping and ensuring it’s properly regulated and measured.

“On the whole, the big incumbent brands are pretty conscious about getting things right, and we see much less big brand work going wrong.”

The book helped to draw attention to the unconscious bias that existed in marketing, with the authors calling out the “sneaky sexism” that many brands continued to perpetuate, such as creating pink-coloured versions of products – for example, razors and staplers – and then putting high prices on them, or overlooking huge swathes of the audience, including older women and women of colour.

“The ASA has shown its teeth and called out brands like Philadelphia and Volkswagen and they have shown that they haven’t just put rules in place for the sake of it, they have actually deployed those rules,” Ms Cunningham said.

“(The industry) (is) now much more aware of what stereotyping looks like, and people are more conscious of what we would have described as sneaky sexism in the book. They are more conscious of where they’re making mistakes or going over red lines, when previously they might not have been.

“So, if domestic work is being shown, it shouldn’t always be done by a woman, it can also be done by men. So that unconscious bias doesn’t play out in the way that it used to.”

Significant progress in categories such as sports, period care and the huge growth in femtech has also helped propel the industry forward, in addition to a rise in more positive representation across the board with more diverse depictions of women of all ages and backgrounds within advertising.

“There are whole categories, which used to be pretty backwards, where often the language used and the conversations that were had were almost had in a sort of very whispered and coded way, have that those have really been transformed,” Ms Cunningham said.

“Companies like Essity and their brands like, Body Form and Tenor, and health brands like Flow have really done so much work to not just open up the conversation, but to shift the whole way in which the category speaks and communicates with a whole new open language, and create a proper generational shift.”

Ms Cunningham also called out brands such as Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, which have shifted away from ideas of “female fitness” to promote women as competitive sportspeople and support women’s football and women’s rugby, as a huge advance.

However, Ms Roberts and Ms Cunningham believe there is still an enormous amount of work to be done within advertising agencies and organisations to close the gender pay gap, to better represent women over the age of 50, and to support and fund female-led brands and businesses – all of which have failed to show significant progress in recent years.

“With all issues around equality and female progress, there’s always this sense of things coming in waves. For every bit of progress, there’s always something that feels like it’s going in the opposite direction. We feel that over the last five years there has been lots of progress, but there is still lots of things that feels like it’s regressive, so lots of forward movement and lots of backward steps,” they said.

“It’s a truth about the history and shape of female progress that movement is never linear: for every forward movement there is almost always some backlash, for every piece of positive progress there is usually some effort to unpack or unpick, for every action there is invariably a reaction. It’s the reason that Feminism has always taken place in waves: a surge of forward movement, followed by activities that pull things backwards.”

Their comments come as major corporations in the US, including Meta, Amazon, Walmart and McDonald’s, begin to scale back DE&I programs, and it is yet to be seen what these changes will mean in other markets.

“Whilst it is not a done deal that what happens in the US will happen elsewhere, we are realistic: the US usually sets the cultural tone for the rest of the advanced economies, particularly when it has very vocal representation and a huge platform. Rolling back the DE&I programmes in the US is profoundly disappointing, and it seems likely that we will see, if not the programmes rolled back elsewhere, then certainly more open and potentially aggressive questioning of their value. Along with that will come a corporate cultural shift ,and then yes, the trickle down will be from the internal culture out to advertising and external marketing.

“But we would argue what we always argue in response to questions about DE&I which is that companies which are very mono in their profile - and this usually means very white, very male, very hetero - find it harder to develop products, services and marketing of those products and services which connect powerfully with diverse audiences. And that, as always, the only way to counter that or to move forward - especially in polarised or turbulent times of change - is to properly respect and listen to the audience,” said Ms Cunningham and Ms Roberts.

Advertising Council Australia head of engagement Hannah Sturrock is optimistic that the US backlash may not take hold within the local market. “I think the backlash on DE&I is still very centred in the US. I hope that in Australia, we’re not as nervous and threatened by the idea as they are in America. Maybe in five years’ time, it will be different. But right now I feel Australians believe the right thing to do is to do our bit to be ethical and sustainable members of society in ad land.”

Ms Sturrock leads the ACA’s Create Space initiative, which aims to measure and improve diversity and inclusion across Australia’s advertising industry. The last census, in 2021, revealed some positives, with an increase in females in C-suite and management roles rising to 54 per cent, up from 46 per cent.

However, the census also revealed a significant amount of work was needed around inclusion, which dropped from 62 to 56, driven by a lower sense of belonging and an increase in negative behaviour.

“The top-line takeaway is that things are definitely improving but we need to resign ourselves to the somewhat disappointing truth that the rate of change will be slow,” Ms Sturrock said . “These are very slow-moving metrics, and if we’re all looking for things to sort of turn around in two years, we’re going to feel very despondent.”