WACL LAUNCHES ‘THE 50%’ CAMPAIGN TO ACHIEVE ITS MISSION OF WOMEN FILLING 50% OF CEO ROLES

This year at WACL we mark our centenary with a new campaign to support our mission to achieve 50% of CEO roles in advertising and communications filled by women, and for those women to proportionally represent the full diversity of British society. 

Based on the current rate of change, women won’t hold 50% of CEO positions until 2060, a statistic that feels all the more unacceptable as WACL celebrates its centenary year in 2023. 

Equal representation among CEOs isn’t an absolute or standalone objective: only when 50% of CEOs within advertising and communications are women, will the industry have achieved the basic level of change it deserves. 

In turn, this will build momentum through better representation of women in adland and the communications it creates, to improve the representation of women in all walks of life.

If we don’t all work together to improve representation at CEO level and in turn in all key decision-making roles, today’s inequities, misrepresentation and gender pay gap will continue - and get worse.

We won’t get where we need to be if we don’t know where we’re starting, and can’t be honest with ourselves about what we need to do to get there.

At the heart of the call to “Measure With Meaning” is a mandate for leaders across the industry to provide clarity about their organisation’s progress on the journey to equal representation. 

In support of this collective mission, we have launched “The 50% CEO Playbook” – a practical roadmap for organisations to download and use, that details five levers of change to help achieve the 50% representation target, why each lever is important, recommended actions for each and what they can achieve if implemented. The levers are:

• Change the language of leadership
• Promote for potential
• Be a women’s health hero
• Be flexible first
• Work like the world is watching

Actions for each lever start with building data by measuring meaningfully. Understanding the data in a specific organisation is essential to ground changes in REALITY, have CLARITY about the actions to take, and hold TRANSPARENCY at the core to adequately measure progress. 

Further, to benchmark progress towards 50%, it is essential to truly understand the gender leadership gap and how to close it, and to determine how intersectionality impacts women’s progress in the workplace and how to address that as WACL’s 50% mission is only meaningful if it works for all women. 

Also detailed in the Playbook are case studies detailing how leading organisations – Channel4 , Grey , Conker , PepsiCo UK , Dark Horses , Diageo , Pablo London , Publicis Media , Sky , Quiet Storm Agency , Tesco and Vodafone - achieved positive steps towards gender parity. 

Rania Robinson , WACL President and Quiet Storm CEO, says: “Although 70% of the advertising industry’s junior manager cohort are women, IPA and AA surveys show that women take only 37.5% to 39% of C-suite level roles. Compared with the situation before, this is progress. But it’s not enough.

“The five levers we set out in the 50% Playbook are by no means the only factors affecting equality. However, evidence suggests that addressing them will have a significant impact. 

“WACL hopes that this playbook will prompt reflection, provide useful new actions to try and encourage agencies, where possible, to share anonymised data and strategies for change to build our collective learning.”

Each generation wants the next to have more opportunities, not less, and do better, not worse. Failure to act now will deliver a worse future, not an improved one. 

Agencies are being urged to join the #50%mission and commit to #MeasureWithMeaning by downloading the playbook from https://wacl.info/campaigning/50-ceo-campaign/, turning the advice into positive action to drive change and contributing to what WACL hopes will become an industry knowledge bank of best practice.