There’s a strong evidence of a gender pay gap in the Marketing Industry.
Each line below represents the gender salary gap situationa in one of the countries surveyed. The graphics show that there are very different realities in thi point between markets.
Said this and calculating average global gender pay gaps for executive manager/C-Suite shows the gender pay gap is 13% in favour of men.
For other senior staff, the pay gap was 11% in favour of men, for middle managers the figure is 7%, for junior managers it is 1% and for industry starters (interns/trainees/junior execs) ithe gender pay gap surrounds the 5% in favour of men.
The gender pay gap is not the only problem for women in this economic sector. Women and and ethnic minorities report poorer lived experiences than men and ethnic majorities respectively.
Despite the Marketing setor scores the best in the Diversity and Inclusion ranking among the industries surveyed it is far from being an inclusive and gender balanced sector. The report identifies key challenges around family status, age and gender as well as ethnicity and disability.
Those are data from the Preliminary results of the first Global DEI Census. THis investigation has been carried out by Kantar with the support of The WorldFederation of Advertisers and some other institutions, companies and Associations in the Marketing and Advertising sector such as: EACA, IAA, Effie, Lions, and Advertising Week, among others.
The results concerning the USA and Canada will be published during The Advertising Week New York, later today. UK findings are not included in this Global Survey.
“This has been a Herculean but long overdue effort. For the very first time we hear and see the marketing industry in all its different facets and nuance. There is a confidence and strong sense of belonging that rings true of the marketing industry. But there are significant minorities in all countries saying they witness negative behaviours and discrimination on account of their age, family status, gender, ethnicity, race, disability, mental health, sexuality… such that one in seven considers leaving the industry. No company or industry can ignore this; a line has been drawn in the sand and we now know where progress must be made. The onus on us all now is to work together to make our industry fairer, more diverse and more inclusive and to measure our common progress in a second wave in the Spring of 2023,” said Stephan Loerke, CEO of the WFA.
Kantar surveyed on 10,349 respondents from 27 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Greece, the Gulf,Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), Hong Kong SAR, China, India, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and USA.
The fight for equality and inclusion, still not lost in the Marketing Industry ?
A significant minority of respndents say they would leave their company and the industry on the basis of a lack of diversity and inclusion, while there is a 19 percentage point range on the overall inclusion score. Belgium does the best with 74%.
In an industry struggling to find the right talent, the lack of diversity and inclusion is a serious concern with 17% saying they were likely to leave their current company of as a result of the lack of inclusion and/or discrimination they had experienced. Fifteen per cent said they would leave the industry. The Netherlands was the best performing country on this issue, with 9% saying they would find new employment within the industry.
Besides, most respondents feel their organisatiosn are taking action to be more diverse and inclusive, but some markets lag behind significantly.
The majority of respondents feel their company is working hard to become more diverse and inclusive, with 60% of global respondents agreeing. The US topped the chart at 83%, although again there was a 14-percentage point difference between white respondents and those from ethnic minorities. However, in some countries this figure is significantly lower. In one market, only 26% of respondents believed their organisation was taking active steps to address diversity and inclusion.
Globally, a majority say they feel a strong sense of belonging to their company (the absence of discrimination and presence of negative behaviour), but the score varies a lot beteen markets. On this point men scored at 69% compared to women at 61% globally.
The global average for “company sense of belonging” is 68% but this hides a wide range of performance, with Sweden top scoring on 76% and the bottom market achieving just 53%. Again, there is variation between different groups. In the US, the score averages 66%, peaking at 71% among white respondents and compared to 59% among ethnic minorities.
While, there are pay gaps linked to ethnicity, they can represent positive and negative discrimination in equal measure.
Other key finings
Main findings of the DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) Census are as well:
1) Most common forms of discrimination are reported on basis of age and family status: 27% of thr respondents agree that their company does not treat all employees fairly regardless of family status and 27% agree that their company does not treat all employees equally regardless of age. Thirty-six per cent of respondents estimate that age can hinder one’s career while 40% of women agreed that family status can hinder one’s career.
2) The lived experiences of minorities are poorer
3) A significant minority report mental health issues; very often they do not tell their employer: Mental health issues are still taboo for many. Around 7% of respondents globally reported a long-term health condition and of these 71% said they related to mental health.
However just 44% of them had made their employers aware of the issue. The good news is that among those who did, 59% agreed their employer was “generally supportive”. The best performing country on this metric was Ireland, where 76% agreed.
4) Responses indicate very different inclusion scores between the national markets surveyed: There are huge variations generally between markets. When looking across all scores, Belgium scored highest of the 27 markets surveyed in Kantar’s Inclusion Index at 74%. But one of the starkest learnings from the survey is the extent to which some countries reported figures significantly below the global averages when it comes to the absence of discrimination and presence of negative behaviours. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to reviewing the responses from women in these same markets. These differences also corroborate systemic issues in some countries where there have been longstanding societal problems around gender, race and/or ethnicity.
5) The lived experiences of people with disabilities are poorer in some but not all markets. Globally, 8% of disabled respondents say they have faced discrimination based on disability and they also tend to score lower against “feel like I belong at my company” than non-disabled respondents. No disabled respondents reported experiencing discrimination on the grounds of disability in the GCC countries, Malaysia, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.
