Writing an International Women’s Day op-ed a bit late has its benefits; I’ve been able to watch comments and talk to my peers.
We're an audience to male leaders taking to LinkedIn to say how great women are, while they remain underpaid. We’re watching our workplaces shout out to working mums on Slack while making them redundant on maternity leave. The group chats with our friends reveal the real deal. One resounding message is coming through loud and clear: women are fed up with surface-level discourse.
Most companies have the same playbook: talk about mums, get some snacks in, and make the most senior female leader talk about her journey. Maybe they’ll even pay a woman to speak about being a girl boss, or ensure the food is from a female-led business (this should be the baseline). None of this breaks systems or tries to change a worrying societal shift away from DE&I.
We don’t need panels, we need action. Particularly in APAC, where some markets, such as Japan and Korea, are far behind other developed markets on key gender gaps. Japan’s 22% gender wage gap is the highest among G7 countries, while South Korea’s 29% gap is one of the widest in the developed world, according to the OECD.
We, as marketers, do know that DE&I is good for business. Perhaps the strongest data point comes from the Oxford and Unstereotype Alliance research, launched in 2024 as ammunition for our industry to counter this topic. It found that brands running inclusive ad campaigns achieve 16% higher long-term sales than those running non-inclusive ones.
Yet, according to the Conference Board, there was a 68% drop in the use of DEI in S&P 500 filings in 2025, with 53% of companies adjusting their messaging and only 55.1% disclosing data on women in management (down from 71.2% in 2024).
We are failing to turn the tide on this. We’ve all been in meetings at our agencies where, albeit well-meaning, people have bemoaned that DE&I isn’t ‘trendy’ with clients at the moment or had the Bud Light work parroted back as an excuse for ‘safe’ work. We need to try harder.
The marketing industry doesn’t just have an ethical responsibility to do this; it also has the skill set to do so.
So, here’s the brief:
The problem: DE&I has a marketing problem. The values are overwhelmingly popular. The acronym has been successfully turned into a slur. We are the industry that convinced people that a fizzy drink could achieve world peace. This is our problem to fix.
The insight: People don't oppose fairness. They oppose a three-letter abbreviation. We have rebranded 'cheap' as 'affordable luxury' and 'ran out of stock' as 'limited edition'. Reframing 'don't fire pregnant women' should be within our capabilities.
The proposition: Inclusion is not a political position. It is a commercial advantage we have been apologising for.
The evidence: Inclusive ad campaigns deliver 16% higher long-term sales. Target lost $12.4 billion after its DEI rollback. Costco gained 7.7 million shoppers by holding firm. The data is not the problem. The storytelling is.
The ask: Use the skills we sell every day, not for a panel discussion or a logo in rainbow colours for 30 days, but for an actual, sustained, evidenced commitment. The kind we'd deliver without question if a client asked us to.
Timeline: Original deadline: 1995. Current deadline: Now.
Charlotte Mceleny is a freelance editorial, PR and communications leader.
