Kat Gordon and the 3% Conference: Gender Misrepresentation in Creative Agencies

I learned about Kat Gordon and her leadership initiative, the 3% Conference, when I stumbled across a document with a hot pink title. Confidently, it stated: “100 Things You Can Do Right Now to Help Drive the 3% Number Upward.” But 3% of what? After reading a couple items on the document including “Banish the term ‘women’s account’ from your vocabulary,” “Check to see how many women are on the board of your holding company,” and “amplify the ideas of women in meetings” I answered my question. The 3% Conference emphasizes and takes issue with the fact that men hold 97% of creative director agency positions. Currently a strategy intern at a branding agency, my interest couldn’t help but be piqued. So I sent an e-mail to the conference hoping for a response, and the founder responded within forty-eight hours.

Kat Gordon opens the door of her Palo Alto home with a grin spanning from ear to ear. She guides me over to her light-filled family room, where I take a spot on her couch and prepare my questions. What begins as a straightforward Q&A about her endeavor rapidly turns into a verbose conversation involving Swedish versus Texan creative culture, the tech community’s corporate involvement in feminist initiatives, and male sociologist Michael Kimmel. To put it simply, it was hard to leave.

After fifteen years in the advertising business, Kat Gordon left the agency Hal Riney & Partners, for a life of freelancing. Why? She had never seen anyone pregnant. In addition to that—she had never seen a female executive. Staying on didn’t even seem like an option—it’s hard to consider one if it has never materialized. By now it is widespread knowledge that women hold only 3% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. However, when Kat Gordon founded the 3% Conference the same statistic held true for creative directors. As the visionaries and directors of creative and strategic content, creative directors determine the narrative of global media.

The absence of women in the field directly aligns with the media’s misrepresentation of women, and individuals’ harmful misinterpretation of media standards and societal expectations. That was a trajectory Gordon wanted to redirect. In 2012 she established the 3% Conference as an opportunity for agencies, designers, creative directors, strategists, and business owners to understand the bias behind this creative glass ceiling. Since then she’s hosted conferences around the world effecting real change in the industry.

But Gordon insists that on stage she does not mean to reprimand the industry, or wax poetic over her personal struggle. Instead, she frames the issue as a business opportunity. Advertising is consumerism’s communication channel. And who consumes? Women. To quote Gordon, it is a “business imperative to include women…. The truth is that women are the superset, not the subset, and the rate at which women are amassing wealth and exerting influence is unprecedented. Yet the work that is supposed to motivate them springs almost entirely from a male perspective.”  Pasta brand Barilla smartly sponsored women’s cycling, because “who buys Barilla pasta? Women.” The dividends from the women’s campaign ended up covering their secondary men’s cycling campaign.

I ask if Gordon can tell if a spot has a female strategist or creative by looking at content. She replies, “If two people think the same, then only one of them is relevant…When I see something more thoughtful, more nuanced…often there was a women involved… that’s what I get excited about. If women had free license, ‘here’s how I see the world,’ I feel like we’d see the most amazing work we’ve ever seen.” Currently however, men dominate advertising and, by default, advertising awards – from submissions to selections.

The 2013 Clio Awards, an annual program that recognizes innovation and creative excellence in advertising, announced the jury chairmen, and not a single woman made the list. Gordon’s substantial community of thought leaders, agencies, and individuals rallied against the Clio’s announcement. Eventually, the committee extended a personal invitation to Gordon to visit their office where they promised all future juries would be half female. Very shortly thereafter, the executive director of the Art Director’s Club, Ignacio Oreamuno, announced the “Let’s Make the Industry 50/50 Initiative,” a direct challenge for ad award shows to create gender-equal juries.

Gender equality in the workplace has become a hot topic, especially within the technology and business sectors due to Ellen Pao’s court case. However, Gordon does not differentiate the issues women face depending on industry, stating: “I think the reasons why women are stalled in single digits are not that dissimilar between industries. And I’ve watched as the tech industry has become increasingly active in our community. Our sponsors have included Apple, Adobe, Cisco, Twitter, Oracle. They see what’s happened in advertising and the amount of traction we’ve had in a short time, and they’re kind of curious. ‘What can we learn from them that we can then export?’…In terms of unconscious bias, lack of support for motherhood, lack of mentorship, it’s all the same things, just presenting in different environments.”

But while Gordon maintains that the same issues affect women regardless of industry, she contends that cultural contexts play a significant role. The least friendly place she’s hosted a conference?

“I would say out of all the cities the one that I found to be the least friendly to women was Austin, Texas,” she says. “The host agency had given me a list of all the agencies in town, about 33. I wrote a personal email telling them we were coming, I heard back from two. And those were the two women. However, I will say when we went to Salt Lake City, there were only three female creative directors in the entire state of Utah. So it was the most dire situation, however, we had the best male participation at that event. So I went to that market with a very preconceived notion and they were so nice, so open.” Gordon discusses these cities straightforwardly, mentally scanning the lengthy roster of locations, picking out the surprises and commenting on the past interactions. At the time of this conversation she had recently returned from London. While certainly a progressive, global metropolis, she observed “a really unique culture there that’s almost Hal Riney to a factor of ten.” She continues emphatically, “They call it a laddish culture, it’s almost like they’ve enabled men who are creative geniuses to behave so poorly because they’re the rain makers, that it creates this culture that makes women completely not welcome. And they talk about it, but they talk about it as, ‘it is what it is.’” Kat Gordon’s response? “No, you’ve made it that way.”

Gordon understands that to hook naysayers she needs to return to the business sense behind her initiative. But from our conversation’s beginning to end, her voice maintains an urgency that’s not about earning money or amassing Cannes lions. She wants to grow women’s careers. It’s easy to detect her passion for debunking sexist beliefs and practices that present themselves every day in creative communities. Referencing a first-hand piece published by Colleen DeCourcy, before she held her current post as Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, Gordon remembers, “There was a line in it that I’ll never forget, that when she was concepting with her creative partner –a man—and he turned to her and said, ‘that’s a nice necklace, I could hold on to it while I fuck you from behind.’ And that’s the kind of thing that happens, constantly.” But Gordon also highlights subtler offensives, which are harder to pinpoint and therefore more difficult to resolve. She explains, “part of being a great creative is…any idea you just blurt it out, you don’t really want to feel like you’re editing yourself. So I think men use that as an excuse, ‘Well we don’t want women in the room because we’re rude, and we want to be able to come up with ideas.’ But they don’t understand that really creative women can be rude too. And you don’t need to be rude in a way that makes people feel unwelcome.”

Kat Gordon held her tongue about Hal Riney’s “old boy’s club” culture for fifteen years. But she’s not staying silent any longer. In March 2015 the 3% Conference became an LLC under “3% Movement” and just this past month the 3% Conference announced a new endeavor: agency certification for gender equality. Modeled after the LEED Certification board that awards levels of sustainability to buildings, Gordon wants the 3% Conference to enable agencies to vet themselves and win client work because of their well-rounded creative staff. They hope to award agencies “3% Certified Platinum” “3% Certified” “3% Merit” and “3% Pending” levels in accordance to those agencies scores in three segments: Female Leadership, Workplace Equality & Culture, and Equal Creative Opportunity. Yet this is not meant as a slap on the wrist even for those agencies who do not make top of class after the three month long evaluation. Instead, 3% Certified provides a “concrete roadmap that includes a set of recommended solutions and strategies for improvement” regardless of award.

While the percentage of women creative directors has risen to 11% since the 3% Movement’s founding, Gordon hopes this new frontier will bring it up to 50%. Nothing gets Gordon more excited than good advertising: an art form that diversity and respect create by definition. She wants women to freelance because they want to, not because rising through the ranks isn’t an option. I have no doubt she won’t stop until she gets there.