Last July, Verity London published its inaugural People, Purpose & Planet report.
As the Strategy and Communications Agency for Responsible Business, it’s important for us to walk the talk and lead by example with our own purpose agenda.
We’re working to deliver on the promises we made for this first year of our report, implementing and rolling out a range of commitments and initiatives.
International Women’s Day gives us an opportunity to explore one of those – how we could best deliver on our pledge which looks at Empowerment for women in the Marketing, Communication and Advertising Industry.
Our report outlined how women are significantly less likely to become entrepreneurs and set up their own businesses. Whilst the comms world appears to be filled with successful women, the number of those at entry and middle-level positions often masks the truth – a lack of female representation at senior leadership or boardroom level.
We want to play our part to increase diversity within communications, democratising access to the industry and supporting the next generation of purposeful communicators. Our aim is to encourage more businesses to spotlight under-represented voices within the communications industry.
However, even with this clear intention, we had to work out what action we could take that aligned with our business, and that we could action and deliver successfully.
As a female-led agency, run by Karen Benveniste and Debra Sobel, and with over 60% of our team women, we planned a workshop so we could all have a say in how Verity could make a difference.
During this brainstorming to mark International Women’s Day, we looked at the following questions:
In total, over 100 brilliant insights and ideas were shared. To go deeper into each topic, this creativity was followed by an anonymous voting exercise and a team discussion.
And these are the outcomes.
Every woman has a different experience of what it means to be empowered. Our social background, family or professional experiences have shaped our personality and vision of today’s main challenges.
The main learning was that only a small minority of our ideas were about how we could improve women’s sense of themselves (such as feeling more confident). For the most part, our answers covered issues around how women are perceived.
For our team, female empowerment means being taken seriously, to be given the same opportunities as men, to be listened to, and not judged on our appearance, style or voice.
“Feminism isn’t about making women stronger: women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.” — G.D. Anderson
Our top three answers after voting were:
We questioned the main challenges for women to become more empowered. 38% of our ideas mentioned maternity leave and childcare.
Our team discussed the difficulties they have encountered when starting a family. Even though fathers are now regularly primary carers and attitudes are changing, the biological fact that women have the physical process of pregnancy and birth means it’s more necessary for them to take some kind of career break, however small. We discussed how taking a break reduces opportunities to climb the career ladder and increases potential discrimination.
There was a lot of debate around the expectation of society on women to behave and sound like men. Several team members shared the discrimination they faced for their voice being too quiet or high pitched, or their personality being too discreet.
Should women learn how to be louder and more assertive? Or should our workplaces learn how to listen to a different range of voices?
Beyond gender, the question led us to consider people’s different communication styles and how to manage team dynamics.
Our top three challenges voted were:
Now we were clearer on what female empowerment meant to us, and having considered the main challenges women face in society and the workplace, it was time to start reflecting on solutions.
We recognised that even when we influence mindsets by calling out discrimination and sexist behaviour, learning how to speak up for ourselves or promoting equality in the workplace, the majority of ideas we came up with were based on raising awareness and supporting the next generation.
We know that most of our biases are subconscious and ingrained from a very young age by what we see on TV, how women are represented in ads, at home or at work, what we hear from society and the role models that we have (or lack).
Conversation, education and strong examples were unanimously suggested by the team.
On the one hand, today’s girls need support through mentoring, positive encouragement and through access to successful women as role models.
But boys and men also have a part to play. They need to be invited into the conversation. It’s very hard, when we are not the ones experiencing a social issue, to really comprehend what it means and how it can impact lives.
By sharing our testimonies, by speaking out freely about challenges and by keeping an open mind about other points of view, we can start promoting change.
Our top team comments voted for in this area were:
We finally narrowed down the question and focused on what actions we could take to support women in the comms industry. Two approaches were considered and discussed.
Firstly, how Verity London can empower its own staff.
Second, how we can make a difference in our industry and support the next generation
We had a fantastic brainstorming workshop, with great discussion and clear outcomes and actions, so we can make good on this particular purpose pledge. Stay tuned for our 2022-2023 People, Purpose & Planet report.
