Kevin Roberts, the 66-year-old Lancastrian head of the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, may be spending more time than he had planned at his hideaway in the Lake District. He has been summarily dispatched on leave after declaring that the debate about gender bias was “all over”, even though barely one in 10 senior creative jobs in his industry are held by women, and fewer than one in three in all senior management. Not that he denied the problem, which he was discussing in an interview published last week. Rather, he explained, the reason was that women wanted to do a good job more than they wanted to get to the top. Their ambitions were circular, not vertical; and anyway, he added, it was much worse in other industries, such as finance. Publicis, Saatchi’s French parent company, swiftly disowned the remarks: “Promoting gender equality starts at the top and the group will not tolerate anyone speaking for our organisation who does not value the importance of inclusion.”
For a business that is all about communication, advertising is finding it hard to get its own message right. Earlier this year, Sir Martin Sorrell, the enormously highly paid chief executive of WPP, promised to “tighten and enhance” anti-discrimination training at JWT, a WPP subsidiary in the US, after a female executive lodged a complaint alleging that one of its senior managers repeatedly joked about rape. Advertising’s office culture plays as big a part in encouraging diversity as it does in any other business, and faces the same problems – targets do not make much difference when meetings are built around alcohol, or key decisions are made out of regular office hours, while the cost of living and working in London increasingly restricts entry-level jobs to the middle classes. These are challenges familiar to many industries. So too, although perhaps delivered in a less memorably offensive way, are the views of very senior managers like Mr Roberts, who clearly belongs to the machismo era of leadership: he has recently published a book on leadership, called 64 Shots partly because, he explains in a promotional video, there are 64 positions in the Kama Sutra. It may be less remarkable that he has been sent on leave than that he has lasted at the top, with particular responsibilities for leadership coaching, for so long.
As a basic question of justice, diversity always matters. But it matters more in advertising than in most other industries because advertisements still hold up a mirror to society, and it is a mirror that tirelessly promotes a particular view of a perfect world. The client has some power: following a survey that showed almost all advertisements featuring women preferred the dim and domestic over the intelligent and empowered, the consumer products multinational Unilever announced in June that it would never again spend a penny of its £6.3bn budget on commercials featuring sexist stereotypes. The company pledged that some other way of selling its shampoos would be found to replace the “spin and grin” of improbably glossy hair and impossibly white teeth; men would no longer be induced to buy deodorant on the basis of its appeal to women. Yet, though the client can set the parameters, it is still the agency that pitches its version of the way the world should look, and that view – at least until the number of women creatives gets nearer to critical mass – will continue to be shaped by one male gaze and in all likelihood approved by another. Whatever the impact of the Unilever decision, it would be unwise for anyone to hold their breath waiting for a speedy transformation.
Yet Mr Roberts may have hit on one truth. His model of leadership is no longer very appealing. Women do not like it, and nor, increasingly, do men. Leadership as a kind of military command, the peak of a hierarchy, belongs to a pre-tech age. Modern companies are likely to be non-hierarchical and cooperative, and much more likely to be ones where everyone can flourish.