Give your female students the best chance at becoming the next Kate Stanners or Rosie Arnold, and ace your employability targets at the same time. Just do eight simple things.
- Keep up to date on the current information and debate around gender asymmetry in UK advertising creative departments by signing up to the Lost Girls feed.
- Make sure students can see women, especially mums, killing it in creative departments. Maybe ask some of them to come and talk about their work. See the downloadable PDF for a list of great creative women to follow.
- Rifle through your Linked In. Also, look at ex-students and invite women who have succeeded as creatives, to come back and talk about their experiences. This can make it seem super attainable for current students.
- Include some work by women, or with a strong female voice, in the great examples you share with students. Use stuff where women are the protagonists, where there are realistic representations of women or that shows true insight into what it’s like to be a woman. Look at the work winning the Cannes Glass Lion, or the work She Says loves. See sites with loads of great diverse work in the downloadable PDF.
- Mix it up. Break up same sex teams. Get different people to work together on different projects. Mash up pairs from diverse backgrounds, with different personalities, so they challenge one another. Assign leadership roles to the most unlikely candidates.
- When questioned young men in advertising want to improve their craft skills, but young women want to improve their soft skills. Bets are the course you teach on covers the craft skills pretty well, but there isn’t much in the way of resilience, leadership and presentation training? Be inspired by Lean In and Stanford University, and try to introduce elements of this into your teaching. Full list of resources and organisations that can offer training in the downloadable PDF.
- Make your female students aware of all the wonderful organisations and networks that are there to support them if they want to get a job in a creative department. Check out:
- Creative Equals: http://www.creativeequals.org/
- Creative Social: http://www.creativesocial.com
- The IPA: http://www.ipa.co.uk/diversity
- She Says: http://weareshesays.com/
- The Dots: https://the-dots.com
- Most of the women you are teaching are completely unaware that they may face challenges when applying for and working in creative roles. So, wake them up and start the discussion by holding the Diversity Discussion Session outlined in this handy downloadable lesson plan.