Tamsin Ward
Associate Global Marketing Director
Maxus Walk the Talk has allowed me to see exactly how my gender has been holding me back - because of my own inbuilt views toward gender and what being a female means.
It feels very strange to write about something I am so passionate about, that is so intrinsic to everything in my life, when it wasn’t even something that I remotely considered a few months ago. As a 31 year old woman with no children (but I am very fortunate to a have a wonderful boyfriend and a cat) at the start of the year I would have said I’d never encountered gender inequality. I also would not have described myself as a feminist.
Feminists are angry. They hate men. They’ve simply had bad experiences that have led them to use the ‘sexist’ label in place of a different truth. Or so I thought.
I’m a millennial, or Gen Y, and working for a company like Maxus (which is millennial itself as a network of only 8 years old) since near enough the beginning, has enabled me to move up quickly, in a career that I’ve shaped and molded as much as my managers have on my behalf. Our core behaviours are PACE – we are passionate, agile, collaborative and entrepreneurial; and by being that way we genuinely make great things happen – through our work and for ourselves.
Throughout my entire life – pre and at Maxus I have genuinely believed that being female was not holding me back. There has never been a moment where a man has been chosen over me for a role, or where I’ve felt like my opinions weren’t being considered to the same degree as that of the men around me. Sure – I’ve had the odd ‘stop being so emotional about this’, or an eye roll over the size of my luggage when travelling, but that was all in jest and I love the camaraderie I have with my male colleagues or ‘older brothers’ as is the case at Maxus on the global team.
So it wasn’t until I was given the gift (that is actually what it was) of being asked by Lindsay, our Worldwide CEO, to help her develop Walk the Talk, led by herself and Rudi Symons our Head of Talent & Culture, and alongside Jen Smith our UK Head of Planning; that the penny dropped. I know the gender stats inside out: in the US and UK only 5% of CEOs in the top 100 companies are female. Closer to home, despite being a young, agile, modern media company with a female CEO, only 24% of Maxus’s regional or global ExCos are female. And yet the overall gender split is 54% female and 46% male, so it is clearly not equal the higher we go. But what I didn’t see was how I was personally affected by my gender.
Walk the Talk is Lindsay’s vision of creating gender equality at Maxus, our industry and in fact the world around us. It manifested itself in April across three events in the USA, UK and Thailand, where 200 of our most senior women from around the Maxus network came together to connect, learn, share and inspire each other. We enlisted the expertise of Anna and Cal from Shine 4 Women – the absolutely amazing life coaching experience for female professionals, and they guided us through some difficult exercises, deep truths and pushed us to think big beyond the event. A female-only space allowed our women to share more candidly about common issues, in many cases around caregiving Vs career responsibilities and many others around fear and what holds us back.
Every single woman that I have spoken to around the world that was at Walk the Talk has told me it’s changed their life. We are now witnessing our women step up and ask for promotion, they are taking responsibility for changing the way that their offices support all staff, through flexible working, shared leave, and just simply being more understanding of each other. We are seeing some of our women make an impact on our wider industry, collaborating with clients, partners, industry bodies, and charities to start to close the gender gap and create greater diversity for all. And for Maxus, this is helping us become a more equal place to work, which in turn can only make us on the whole deliver more creative thinking and thus better results for our clients, higher employee satisfaction, and as has been identified by Deloitte, (businesses with more gender diverse boards produce better business results: a 53% higher return on equity) become a more profitable and efficient business.
What it has done for me is allow me to see exactly how my gender has been holding me back – because of my own inbuilt views toward gender and what being a female means – so in fact yes no one has ever chosen a man over me in my career, but I have been headed toward career failure through my own doing!
I’ve always worked extremely hard – pushing my limits and not being afraid to put my views across. At times I’ve held down three jobs simultaneously, I’ve ‘leaned in’ and have ‘not said no’ at key times, and when I look back its all a been a bit of a whirlwind. But now I see why. Because I genuinely believed that I had to work harder than any man whilst I could. Because the day I had a family my marketing career would be over. No more Maxus, no more media. No more meetings, no more pitches, certainly no more Christmas parties and definitely no more travel. Sure I could probably have done a bit, but not with any kind of career progression in front of me and certainly no one pushing me if I wasn’t even pushing myself.
I’m not sure what I think I would have done with my time exactly, but to take the example of the Facing your Fear exercise from Walk the Talk, I probably would have got bored, lost my confidence, been sacked, lost my home, lost my dignity, and ended up in the gutter. Of course none of that is true, nor is my own belief that career should end as soon as family starts.
The only reason I can confidently see how wrong I was is because of the work we are doing with Walk the Talk. My old beliefs weren’t built on nothing, and in many companies even within our own industry I would probably have been quite right. In fact it’s why we statistically start to see the percentage of senior women drop off the higher they get. This is why I am so proud to work for Maxus where we are now leading change for both women and men (brilliantly voiced recently in Campaign US by our Americas CEO Steve Williams). I’m excited about what we can do for equality and a better quality of life for all, and most importantly I’m excited about the career I thought I would lose one day. I’m not under any illusion that life will be easy, but knowing that working hard means that you can truly have it all is life-changing.
Thank you Lindsay, thank you Maxus, I am a feminist x
