With nine out of 10 purchase decisions made by women, communicating to the people that are actually closing the sale would seem a sensible focus for advertising agencies. In turn, it would make sense for this focus to be reflected in the agencies themselves, at all levels of seniority and specialty.
Counter-intuitively, however, the advertising industry at the highest level remains dominated by men. While the overall mix between men and women working in Asian agencies seems to be largely equal, very few women have climbed up to senior regional roles, with Michelle Kristula Green, president of Leo Burnett, Asia-Pacific, the only woman in the region at such a senior level.
It is not so much that the large holding companies have failed to identify the benefits inherent in offering female perspectives. In July, for example, Omnicom announced the launch of G23 in the US, a strategic agency focused on consulting for communications marketed at women, in the process acknowledging both the importance of women’s purchasing power and the seemingly self-evident fact that women can be useful in offering insights about how to attract female consumers.
Indeed, most agencies maintain that on the whole they keep an equal gender balance. “Generally, at management level there’s no gender bias, aside from in Japan and Korea, and on country management and office management level there’s a higher proportion of senior women than men,” says Chris Jaques, Asia CEO at M&C Saatchi.
But, despite all this, is a glass ceiling still keeping ambitious women from reaching the very top jobs in the Asian advertising industry?
Some responses suggest that the situation is more complicated than it first appears. “There aren’t many women that I’ve worked with that I would choose to be managing directors, because they don’t have that X-factor to take them beyond emotional quotient skills,” says Linda Locke, owner of Singapore-based Godmother and former regional creative director at Leo Burnett Arc in Asia-Pacific.
Kristula Green herself also notes that the industry is young in Asia, which can to some extent account for why women have not had enough time to grow into senior roles. “Also, to get to the top takes a lot of drive, and requires that person to put his or her career first and foremost,” she says, adding that it would be a greater concern if the agencies in general were not so well-balanced.
However, one area where there is more concensus is that women are aggressively under-represented on the creative side of the business in Asia. While not exclusively an Asian problem, the lack of debate about the gender imbalance on creative teams is nonetheless surprising, both from an ethical and commercial perspective.
“Female creatives add value, because half of the consumers are female, ” argues Masako Okamura, creative director at Dentsu, who points out that, in Japan women between the ages of 20 and 40 are some of the biggest spenders.
Producing hard statistics on the gender imbalanced in the creative rooms is difficult. While publicly endorsing gender equality, the holding companies simply don’t keep track of the numbers, referring instead to individual agencies in the region. However, the individual agencies also have no record of these statistics; nor do they seem particularly concerned with compiling figures.
Instead, anecdotal evidence has to suffice. In terms of numbers, it is pretty common to be looking at maybe three women out of 20 people in a creative team.
“Part of what it means to be a creative is still really associated with a chilled-out, male and urban culture,” explains one industry source. “The ‘superstar creative’ of the 1980s isn’t dead yet. Women, who are often very different in their approach to their work, are not necessarily seen as people who will fit in, and people hire people that they will get along with. And, if most of your senior management is male, well...”
In a working environment dependent on positive team dynamics, ‘fitting the profile’ can easily become a euphemism for either being similar to the existing team members or for not rocking the boat. This does not have to be a conscious policy - but many female creatives could still be missing out simply because they do not fit a pre-existing profile.
But while gender imbalances need addressing, even more crucial is the fact that agencies are just not doing enough to attract female talent.
“Do you know how many women look into creative agencies? Roughly one woman to every 10 men,” says Locke.
Jaques sees a straightforward reason for this low interest. “Part of the problem in attracting talent is the working environment in advertising agencies - which is about accepting endless abuse that makes no sense,” he says. “And maybe women are too smart to do that, which is why the industry’s difficulties in attracting and maintaining talent are exaggerated when it comes to creative women.”
Furthermore, creative women in Asia do not necessarily want to work in advertising agencies. “Where do creative women in Asia go to work? It’s more a question of what they’re passionate about. Many go into fashion and magazines,” adds Locke.
Jaques attributes such choices to a desire for creative freedom and to the fact that many women in Asia remain confident that they will not be the sole breadwinners in the family.
Maybe so, but why do those women who do go in to the creative side of advertising not stay? The working environment is an issue - and long hours and the difficulties of giving creative staff flexi-time all clearly play a role.
There is, however, a less quantifiable, reason that may go some way to explaining why many women don’t last in the industry.
Experiences related to innuendo or sexual politics in the creative teams indicate that gender-based jokes, for instance, are widely acceptable in ways that racially based jokes are not.
“Do injustices and sexual innuendo make our jobs harder?” asks one anonymous female creative. “Yes. And we have to dance around the issues without having a voice. Female creatives are in a real Catch 22, because if we are friendly, we are flirts, otherwise we’re bitches. And this situation is worse in Asia than it is in Europe or in the US.”
This is not to say that ignoring such issues is a conscious policy within the industry. It is more a case of no-one having thought about or dealt with the issue of gender discrimination in Asia - and that, according to one source, is to a large extent the fault of agencies “not being forward thinking”.
“As an industry, we’ve done little to make ourselves an attractive career path - for men and women,” the source adds. “It’s not the case that we’re turning women away; we don’t have any knocking on our door. Because our industry is in a state of flux, we haven’t thought about how to be a good career path.”
Moving ahead, the focus should be on how advertising in Asia can attract and keep top female talent.
Creating a more harmonious work-life balance in a reactive industry run on tight deadlines would be a step in the right direction. “This is difficult as it has become part of the nature of the industry - still, some great clients like Procter & Gamble and Philip Morris show that it can be done,”says Kristula Green.
“I think it is really important that we as an industry talk about this issue,” adds Okamura. “After I was a judge in Cannes, I held a lot of talks outside Tokyo, and got a lot of really positive responses from the audience - one woman wrote to me and said she didn’t even know that women were making commercials.”
Attracting talent when there is not much money or even creative freedom means agencies have to find other selling points.
“Perhaps, we should get Hollywood to make a movie about advertising [in Asia],” quips Okamura.
But Okamura might well be on to something. Ompong Remigio, ECD at Grey Philippines notes that in the Philippines, advertising is considered a glamorous job. “Although I haven’t counted, we have a balanced number of men and women in our teams,” she says.
For some, though, putting too much emphasis on workplace sexual politics is in some ways missing the point. “I don’t think it works to look at this in political ways - we need to look at where are they, what can we do to attract them and why are we not attractive?” concludes Locke.