Saatchi and Saatchi is all over the news following Chairman, Kevin Roberts’ ill-advised Business Insider interview where he essentially said that gender diversity is a non-issue for the agency and that he spends zero time worrying about it. Not because it doesn’t exist (women make up 46.4% of the advertising industry but only 11.5% of creative directors are female) but because he believes this is what women want and therefore it’s not something he needs to tackle.
To my mind (and presumably that of Publicis Groupe, which immediately put him on leave), Roberts is missing the fundamental point.
He may well be right in stating that women (and many men) increasingly seek all-round life balance and happiness rather than power, status and cash as their defining goal. However, if this is the case, how do we, as agency leaders, recalibrate our senior roles, career paths and flexible working policies, to make sure that, wherever possible, we can accommodate this new aspiration.
Advertising and PR agencies should not be satisfied with senior roles and career paths that appeal only to one gender and to a particular kind of person within that gender. To attract and retain the best talent, and be able to understand the target audiences of our clients, we must make sure that both men and women, introverts and extroverts, parents and non-parents, all feel they have a place and aspire to get to the top, with confidence that they can do this while maintaining the things outside of work that matter most to them.
I firmly believe that holding senior roles can be part of a happy life – and that achieving and maintaining this this must be a fundamental part of how we run businesses, whether advertising, PR or any other field. Our people are changing – to succeed in the millennial world, we need to change too.