First 100 days

After reading the recent article on 'Finding a Balance' in Mad, itself a response to WPP's Creative Chief Neil French's remarks that women in advertising are 'crap' and don't get the to thelp because they 'go suckle something' I find myself oddly torn.

Odd in that on the one hand I admire French's ardent political incorrectness, and the fact that it's a man who has caused us to re-examine the reason why are there are so few women in top marketing positions.

And yet, as a woman who would like to think 'by god I'm sure I could make it if I tried' I feel I ought to defend or at least find a reason why I should have to fight this cause?

The facts are in French's favour: only 22 of the top 100 people in Marketing's latest 100 most powerful marketers were women. And yet the odds are surely with us women when we start out...

I remember back to my first days as a graduate marketing trainee at Unilever in the early 90s. There were so many of us females starting out that our male counterparts looked positively terrified. And at one point our marketing department was so female biased the joke was the marketing director 'doesn't do male marketers!'

So then, where do all these female marketers go? There's a lot of pussy footing around the issue of us leaving to bring up families. Now this appears at first as an indisputable contributor. Especially as the average age for starting a family gets older, marketing mums will increasingly face the issue of trying to juggle senior management positions and children. Think how much easier it would be as a younger mum - not just in terms of less work pressure, but arguably it being an easier point in your career to take time out.

So does that mean that unless we older would-be Mums can find a house husband, our marketing career is doomed?

Absolutely not. I find real solace in the Market Research business. There's an indisputably female dominated business at all levels. And what's more, it's a business that must put more strain on family life than a monthly early morning board room meeting. Just think about all those late night research groups and frequent trips to the other end of the country if not the world. So how do they do it?

Over to you market researchers out there, but my guess is its a combination of an industry that is founded on a flexible working hours and marriages founded on having to work around some less than ideal work intrusions into what most people would call private time. Good ol' give and take. Am I right?

Here's the link:women in marketing