The marketing industry must do more to address the dark corners of pay transparency

There are just a few days to go before Marketing Week closes its Career & Salary Survey, and this month’s column is all about why you really should fill it in, especially if you’re a woman.

News in last week: The UK’s gender pay gap has widened for the first time since 2013. I’ll let you read the depressing details directly, no need for me to get into the weeds here. Except to say that as of last Wednesday, women in the UK are now effectively working for free compared to men.

So the big question is, as an undeniably forward-facing industry, how are we doing when it comes to the gender pay gap? Well, we won’t know until the results of Marketing Week’s annual Career & Salary Survey are revealed, but if the mean, industry-wide data is any kind of bellwether, things don’t look good. Not least because as I wrote earlier this year, marketing’s gender pay gap in 2023 stood at around 16% – twice the average UK.

“It’s astonishing really – we don’t feel as if we’re a male-dominated sector. It shows the need to be even more conscious of all the systemic issues at play even in an environment where you might instinctively feel their impact would be less,” Zoe Harris, chief customer officer at On the Beach tells me, echoing a sentiment that I think rings true for many of us.

While we know that in our industry revenue-driving roles like sales, performance marketing, and analytics are still male-dominated – and thus associated with higher salaries compared to brand management roles for example – it’s true, that systemic issues are the biggies that underlie marketing’s gender pay gap. A fact underlined by new research from the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading body campaigning for gender equality, which shows nearly two-thirds of the gender pay gap in Britain is unexplained by industry or occupation. Even if women and men worked in exactly the same jobs and sectors – controlling for other factors – nearly two-thirds of the gender pay gap would still exist. It stands to reason therefore that if our industry’s gender pay gap consistently nets out at double that of the all-industry average, broadly speaking the underlying systemic factors are twice as weighty.

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The motherhood penalty

Driven by biases and assumptions that mothers are somehow less committed, available, or capable in their professional roles, often leading employers to assign them less challenging or lower-paying work, the motherhood penalty is notably harsher in the UK than many other economies. New mothers in Britain experience a 44% drop in hourly wages over a decade compared to men.

The UK also has some of the highest childcare costs among OECD countries, often forcing women into part-time work or lower-paying, flexible roles, again intensifying the penalty.

Then there’s paternity leave. We have the worst statutory paternity leave offer for dads and co-parents in Europe: just two weeks paid at £184.03 – less than half the minimum wage. Somewhat unsurprisingly, uptake is low – the financial disincentive for men to participate is just too high in many cases. And knock-on effect? Opportunities to redistribute caregiving responsibilities, normalise men’s involvement in child-rearing, and lessen the career interruptions typically borne by women are reduced.

“But I’ll put my battle armour on here and say it’s as much a cultural issue as it is a policy one,” says Harris. “How do we encourage more men to take advantage of flexible working and parental leave that does exist so that the equality dynamic is shifted from not discriminating against women, to it not being a female specific issue at all?”

While we like to think of ourselves as quite progressive, compared to more regulated sectors, marketing and advertising have fewer systemic requirements for pay transparency.

Tanya Joseph, marcoms veteran and the architect of Sport England’s award-winning This Girl Can campaign agrees, but also sees an opportunity to change the types of skills that are valued in the workplace, versus only levelling the playing field.

“I am pretty sure that if men took more than a couple of weeks’ parental leave or if as many men worked part-time as women do, things would change. We would find that time away from the workplace was not seen as a negative but a sign of a well-rounded person, capable of managing multiple serious responsibilities,” she says.

So if things are pretty lousy in the UK generally, is the marketing and advertising industry particularly crap? I think so – just look at Mother Pukka, aka Anna Whitehouse who famously quit her role as a creative copywriter at L’Oréal, having struggled to make work actually work around her family, or Annabelle Black, a senior account director in advertising who sparked an industry-wide discussion after she shared her own story about motherhood burnout.

Make no mistake, Black and Whitehouse are the tip of the iceberg. According to Bloom UK, a staggering 93% of women in the marketing and communications industry report that a lack of work-life balance negatively impacts their mental health.

The dark corners of pay transparency

A lack of pay transparency in hiring and promotions brutally impacts the gender pay gap by concealing disparities and enabling biased decision-making. When salary ranges or criteria for advancement are unclear, women are less likely to negotiate effectively, often accepting lower pay than their male counterparts due to social norms and fear of backlash.

That’s one of the reasons why at Creative Equals Business, we have an entire session for our annual cohort of female trainees dedicated to negotiating skills. It’s also a reason we focus on confidence building more generally, and we’re not alone. Over at Carwow the team is looking at how to bring equity by tackling confidence imbalance.

“We seem to be failing at driving change through regulatory policy, so perhaps it’s time for a very different approach looking at individuals and how to ‘bottom up’ it,” says Harris, adding that she’s keeping a close eye on the Carwow’s initiative.

Then there are the regulatory policies which as Harris says, are failing women in many ways. Although the UK initially led in pay transparency initiatives, newer EU legislation, such as the Pay Transparency Directive, is more comprehensive, requiring salary disclosures during recruitment and prohibiting questions about candidates’ pay history.

With UK legislation lacking the teeth that would compel meaningful change around pay transparency, there’s a huge opportunity for future-focused companies to voluntarily adopt their own policies.

As a female employee of the only global creative agency to have achieved gender fair pay certification – Forsman & Bodenfors – I know how much I and so many of my female employees value the commitment the company has made and its significance.

As an industry that shapes public perception and helps to drive societal change, marketing has a unique power to set new standards for inclusivity, fairness, and diversity in the workplace.

After all, as Joseph observes, committing to pay equity “takes leadership, willingness to change, humility to acknowledge if you get it wrong, resilience to persist nevertheless and often but not always a financial investment”. But, she adds, the rewards are huge. “Imagine if you could hold on to your talent, the people you have invested in want to stay, are motivated because they feel valued?”

Honestly, I’m surprised (but not surprised) that more players in our industry haven’t stepped up to the plate, if only because the early-mover rewards are there to be reaped in reputation terms.

Currently, our industry is notable for its lack of pay transparency. The creative nature of the business, combined with its reliance on freelance work and project-based roles, fosters a lack of standardised pay scales and opaque remuneration practices. It’s also a fact that while we like to think of ourselves as quite progressive, compared to more regulated sectors, marketing and advertising have fewer systemic requirements for pay transparency. In industries like finance, for example, structured pay bands are more common, making disparities easier to identify and address. Again, we have to get much better as an industry.

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Tangible steps versus box-ticking

While early compliance rates with the government’s 2017 adoption of the gender pay gap reporting mandate were good, enforcement was suspended in 2020 to ease the burden on employers during the pandemic. Reporting resumed in 2021, but data has shown what is frankly glacial progress in narrowing the gap since, with many sectors, including our own, still reporting significant disparities.

Honestly, I’ll eat my hat if the Marketing Week survey data reveals a significant improvement on last year’s gender pay gap – after all, there’s no reason it should: just like every other industry we face zero enforcement mechanisms or mandatory corrective action plans when reporting our gender pay gaps.

Joseph, previously vice-chair of the Fawcett Society who lobbied the government for statutory Gender Pay Gap reporting pre-2017, told me candidly: “It was a huge step forward yes, but before the ink was dry on the legislation, I think we knew we should have pushed for detailed action plans to be published alongside the gender pay gap. Knowing the size of the gap is not enough, we need to know how it’s going to be closed and by when. Only then can we properly hold organisations to account.”

Time to lead

As an industry committed to creativity and innovation, often tasked with presenting ourselves or our clients as progressive and forward-thinking, is it naive to think we really shouldn’t still be struggling with gender pay equity? And struggling we are – not to be a Debbie Downer but even if Marketing Week’s survey reveals an improvement in the gender gap data this time around, I predict it will only be marginal.

Isn’t it time we did better? As an industry that shapes public perception and helps to drive societal change, marketing has a unique power to set new standards for inclusivity, fairness, and diversity in the workplace. Change is both achievable and impactful as our own experience at Forsman & Bodenfors shows. But it’s also, let’s face it, simply the right thing to do.

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