Our Industry Needs to Stand with Creative Parents

By Jacqueline Debien, Global Director of Organizational Development
Momentum Worldwide

We know, thanks to data from the 3% Conference, that only 11 percent of creative directors at agencies are women. And instinctively, we know the conflicts between being a mother and being an advertising professional play a part in that disparity.

What you might not know is just how relatively unwelcoming our industry might be for parents. To put it in perspective, here’s additional 3percent Conference data: 76 percent college-educated women in the country bear children. Within the advertising industry, it’s less than 40 percent. For an industry that skews female, and which should fight to maintain the best creative talent regardless of factors like gender or parenting status, that’s a real problem.

I think it points to one of two major issues: either a huge majority of females in the industry opt not to have children OR those who do have children, leave.

This begs the question, are we creating an ad agency environment where motherhood—and parenthood in general—is viable? Culturally and structurally, as parents prepare to support kids, we have to ask: are we supporting parents?

If we want to enable advertising to thrive over the next 20 years, we need great talent. If we want great talent, we have to create culture and policies that empower creative parents—which means we have a lot of work ahead of us.

If we don’t succeed, we’ll either hemorrhage our brightest or create a generation of neglected, woe-be-gone children who lost their mom or dad to the “[insert brand here] war room.” No thank you, to either.

So what to do? The answer, pun intended, is baby steps.

COACH BEFORE: The first step to aiding new creative parents is to support the parents before they give birth or adopt. The gestational period for the emotional growth required of parenthood is often overlooked because of the physical growth happening simultaneously. But it is similarly taxing and stressful. Coach your pre-parents and parents on the brink of expanding the brood to a place of ease with their transition. The coaching should help them focus on what they need to accomplish before they leave, and ensure they actually do it.

COACH AFTER: The return to work is fraught with emotion and stress. There is an inevitable inundation of conflicting priorities and sometimes paralyzing disappointment at the lack of success of being the best employee AND the best parent. It sucks. Coaching through these moments of transition can enable parents to identify what’s most important to them right then, being okay with whatever that ends up being, and working toward achievement. Enabling progress gives parents the momentum to continue the balancing act.

CREATE COMMUNITY: Being a parent means you do crazy stuff like sit in rapt attention to a 10-minute monologue on nap schedules, poo color and texture, types of carriers and the pros and cons of cloth diapers (so, more poo). It is not something everyone can appreciate, but it is something a mom always will. The automatic connection of moms with other moms should become part of a sustained network at work, so that moms can feel the support of the “village” that we all know it takes. And consider adding a layer of support that doesn’t exist today. While we all know of mommy blogs and groups and Facebook communities, do we know of any for moms in the advertising world? Can we create these communities, to address the specific challenges of the mom balancing the specific needs of the aforementioned poo with the figurative poo of client pitches and production schedules? Creating mother mentors is a way to connect new moms with other new moms, and new moms with tenured moms. They share this very specific combination of challenges.

THE GOLDEN RULE: Create a culture that believes people who work in the agency are as valuable as clients. What agencies do so well is say that people are their only asset, then they treat them like sandbags on a surging river. Let’s do as much as we can for our people to make work and home feel less divorced—even make them intertwined. Show employees you care with commendation, trust, freedom. And don’t punish parents by skipping promotions or increases because they’ve started leaving work on time to relieve their nannies. Treat employees like people you like, and treat your employees that are parents like employees.

People holding diaper bags have as many powerful creative ideas as those without—and sometimes more. Get a reality check on this fact, and act accordingly.

Let’s do more, because parents are the future great leaders of our work, and they are raising future talent. Let’s do more because it’s what people want and, quite frankly, what they deserve. And let’s do more to become and industry that enables creative parents to contribute to the best of their ability.

Interested in learning more? Check out the Relentless Mothers Series, a four-part webinar series on the motivations of modern mothers in the advertising industry. It details how mothers can and should expect to strike a work-life balance.