Statistics around the number of women that head up UK media agencies are wrong, write Zenith’s Richard Shotton and Claire Linford. It’s time to tone down the optimism.
Women run the media agencies that buy around 80% of the UK’s £20bn ad spend, according to an article by Dominic Mills. He put the comparable number at 20% to 25% in creative agencies.
Impressive figures. But are they accurate?
Dominic’s data
Dominic’s article, as eloquently argued as ever, contained an impressive list of women in charge of media shops. Belinda Rowe. Tracy De Groose. Pippa Glucklich. When he totalled up the billings he discovered 80% is controlled by agencies run by women.
But the stats are questionable. The definition of ‘in charge’ mutates from agency to agency. Chairman at Zenith, network CEO at Dentsu Aegis, agency CEO at Starcom. All in all he mentions seven different titles.
This variation has important implications. If the definition of who’s in charge ranges across multiple job titles then it’s not surprising you can find a woman in one of those positions.
So what data should we use?
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To properly understand gender equality in media agencies, a different approach is needed. We began by analysing the percentage of women holding a single, key title.
We chose agency CEO as the key figure as it’s a near universal title which combines seniority and day to day involvement. Of the top 20 agencies by billings in the UK, for whom we could find the data, 23% of CEOs were women. If you weighted the numbers by billings then 17% of spend is under the control of a female CEO.
Quite a different story from Dominic’s.
But what about other senior positions?
Alongside the CEO data, we also looked at the gender split of a broader group of senior figures at media agencies.
This time Claire and I used data from ALF and selected the 288 most senior people at the top 20 agencies. We defined senior as anyone who was in the C-suite, head of department, managing director, or founder.
Again, a clear pattern emerged. Women held 34% of these senior roles. This compares unfavourably with the IPA’s 2015 data which shows that women make up 53% of all positions in media agencies.
To be fair to Dominic, there is a degree of subjectivity in our selection of the CEO as the key figure and choice of titles defined as senior. We’re also reliant on ALF being up-to-date.
But that said, the broad indication from our work is that Dominic’s article is over-optimistic.
