MORE MOMS
D&AD Future Impact Winner in the Equality & Diversity Category (2019).
INCUBATOR
Droga5
SERVICES
Content Strategy
Experience Strategy
Content Writing
YEAR
2018
PRESS
—
While motherhood is often framed as a “personal choice”, 80% of college educated women in the United States will have children. Most industries will lose 3 out of 10 women to motherhood. Advertising will lose 6. At leading agencies, the figure is closer to 8 or 9. What if we thought of female talent loss through motherhood as a design challenge? How might we use design thinking to identify solutions to make advertising work for more women?
A user-centric, systematic approach to helping women grow their careers.
Our year-long study combined desk research, in-depth interviews and data analysis to map experiential stages, mind-sets, challenges and opportunities over time.
Fighting the one-year drop-off.
While employers focus on maternity leave, the bulk of talent loss is suffered one year after returning to work postpartum. It’s not that women leave demanding jobs when they have kids. It’s that the agency operating system is not designed for them when they’re back at the office.
A suite of solutions to combat burnout and stalling.
Inadequate survival skills to manage and prioritize their workload left some moms with a feeling of "burnout". The other common cohort, "stalled", had a sense that their career priorities were assumed by others. Our research yielded a menu of 24 solutions agencies can implement to help women through the most vulnerable time in their careers.
Sorting solutions for maximum impact.
Our effort and impact analysis identifies which programs have the best return on investment, providing managers with an actionable, manageable approach to the talent drain problem.
“Nothing could be more important. I see no reason why we can’t employ almost all of these solutions.”
WHY IT MATTERS
Gender diversity in advertising remains stubbornly out of reach.
Women make up 11.5% of agency leadership roles and the output reflects it. The problem is so well recognized that clients such as Facebook and General Mills stipulate gender diversity quotas for their agency rosters.
Today in advertising, women are:
4x
Less likely to get screen time.
6x
More likely to wear revealing clothes.
7x
Less likely to speak.
By retaining more moms at ad agencies, we believe we’ll solve the main driver of gender inequality in our industry—and our cultural conversation.