Privilege and bias: a career journey

I started reading Ruchika Tulshyan’s Inclusion on Purpose this weekend, which unintentionally (but serendipitously) coincided with the first federally recognized observance of Juneteenth. It’s been raising a lot of questions snd reflections about my own experiences in the advertising industry, a place that I’ve called home for nearly (gulp) 20 years.

Looking back at my first 16-ish years in the field, before joining my current agency, I could count the number of people of color at the other places where I worked on two hands. Women of color? Less than one hand. But I wasn’t thinking about any of this while I was at those agencies. Racial discrimination wasn’t a topic of discussion. DEI efforts were not prioritized, or even on the radar. It wasn’t quite Mad Men-esque, but in hindsight, every one of those cultures was far from equitable.

I have to acknowledge the incredible amount of privilege I’ve received a middle-class, college-educated, cis-gendered, straight white woman. While I wasn’t in a position to hire folks until the latter half of my career, I was likely complicit in contributing to the homogeny of those workplaces by not advocating for more diversity. It wasn’t intentional. But intention is only half of the equation. In hindsight, there was likely more I could have, and should have, done. But that’s what hindsight is for, right? “When we know better, we do better.”

And while this is not meant to be an excuse, I believe the fact that I was fighting my own uphill battles was part of the reason I didn’t recognize the even greater challenges of marginalized colleagues around me (or more accurately, recognize the lack of their presence altogether).

I’m going to do something very antithetical to inclusion for a minute and tell my own story of bias here, because re-examining my personal experiences, and realizing how they affected both my career and my mental health, has led me to develop greater empathy for other women, women of color, and other underestimated individuals who face even steeper bias and aggression.

—-

Back in 2017, when I was Creative Director at a major-global-holding-company-agency, I wrote an article called “You are not a brand. You are a person.” for the 3% Movement. I discussed how, as a female in a traditionally male-dominated industry, I felt like I constantly had to prove my worth, and earn my spot in discussions, despite my track record of success:

In the last few years, the percentage of women CDs in the industry has jumped from 3 percent to 12 percent. And while that’s incredible progress, it’s just the beginning. Even as a woman in a leadership position at a major global agency, I still find my work being scrutinized differently than the work of my male peers.  Maybe it’s because I [feel as though I] take more time than most to digest and dissect the brief, understand the consumer needs versus the brand needs, and find a real human truth, whereas [it seems like] many other folks jump the gun to "beautiful design” without the proper thought behind it.

I’m not saying that all men are show and all women are substance. But I have seen this tableau played out more than once. When my work is questioned, my answer can’t just be “this is good work and you know it,” which I hear frequently from male counterparts without objection.

Rather, I have to sell myself doubly hard as an expert in the project at hand. I have to show that I’ve done the research, extracted the insights, spoken to third party contributors, gained alignment with the account team, and taken on every single step outside my role as a CD to ensure success.

I suppose, in an unintentional way, being the “thorough and logical CD” has become my brand. But it’s exhausting. And after proving myself time after time, should it still be necessary?

I’ve struggled with perfectionism throughout my life, and in hindsight, it probably started at an early age—always being the youngest, and physically smallest, person in my peer group. It only became more magnified as I got older.

I was already reading and writing by the time I started Pre-K, so my parents, and the teachers at my school, thought it was a good idea for me to skip Kindergarten at the end of that year and go straight into first grade. Back in those days, the potentially negative social-emotional impact of being more academically advanced than your peers wasn’t a consideration. You’re “gifted?” Amazing! Move-on-up to the next level. Getting categorized as “smart” early-on meant that I started first grade at the age of 4. I started high school at 12. I left for college at 16. And I graduated, and started my first advertising job, when I was 20.

I never really felt like my age was as much of a direct hinderance as my stature, though, probably because no one can ever be sure of your age if you don’t outright tell them. The best they can do is guess. But being a 5’1” woman and having a baby-face? That’s visible from a mile away, and led to a whole lot of indirect assumptions about my age and qualifications. I remember in high school, when I was working as a camp counselor in the summers, kids (and even other counselors) would mockingly ask whether or not I was old enough to have that job. For all they knew, I could have been 18—but I looked like I was 12, and that was enough for them to question my competence and belonging. Every time I had to say “yes, I’m old enough” it felt like I shrunk another inch.

This constant questioning led to a lot of self-doubt, which carried-over into my professional life after college. In my first few years, I was often mistaken for an intern. I knew I had every right to be there, but at the same time, felt like I constantly had to prove myself amidst mostly older, male colleagues. I was lucky enough to work for some (read: two) incredible male CDs in the first half of my career (both white, one straight, one gay) who gave me every opportunity to succeed and pushed me beyond my comfort zone. But while they were the exception, and I can never express enough gratitude for how much they supported me, I was still often seen by others as a “sidekick” rather than an equal.

Later in my career, when I had advanced to the role of Associate Creative Director, my CD at the time introduced me as the lead on the several shoots. Yet he was often still the one getting asked to make decisions on-set or approve edits in post. He had fully-intended for me to run the show, but the assumptive structure never gave me the chance. Even when I was standing side-by-side with the director, collaborating on the setup for a scene, I felt as though everyone was waiting for me to turn around and ask my CD for his opinion, as though I (or they?) needed confirmation before listening to my feedback.

Even when I became a Creative Director myself, I never felt like my work wasn’t second-guessed. One of the biggest and most significant instances happened right before I left that major-global-holding-company-agency, and if I’m being fully transparent, was actually a catalyst for my departure. I had been CD on a large client for over a year, developing some super strong work, and winning more business from them as a result. But when we were asked to pitch to become the AOR (agency of record) for a sister product, suddenly my team and I weren’t good enough.

The North American CCO at the time (who had never even met me, mind you) demanded that we bring in a second team to work “alongside” me—which ended up being two of his buddies, an incredibly bro-ish freelance duo of Art Director and Copywriter. My ECD, who had always been fiercely protective and defensive of his team, rolled-over on everything I’d ever believed about him and went along with this plan. Maybe he was worried about his own job? I’ll never know. But whatever the reasons, his inaction stung hard. The freelance wonder twins got their own office. A few my folks were even peeled-off to support them. It didn’t matter I had been working on the larger brand for over a year, and understood the audience and category landscape better than anyone else. I was suddenly relegated to second fiddle.

If the freelance duo’s work had been stellar…if they had come up with some unexpected insights that changed the way we viewed the category or its consumers…maybe it all wouldn’t have hurt so much. I’ve always believed in the spirit of meritocracy. If your work is better than mine, I hope you win so that I can learn something from you. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, not only was the bros’ work decidedly mediocre, it was also off-brand and mildly sexist.

And yet—the CCO’s outward approval of their offensive concepts was only rivaled by his outward criticism of mine.

I was “schooled” on how to write concept statements. Reminded that this was the “big time.” On one call with the CCO, I was even yelled at for “not listening to him and doing things the way I wanted instead of the way he told me to.” I was a grown-ass Creative Director for fuck’s sake. Give me some goddamn credit for having earned this position and knowing what I’m doing. (I’m getting furious just writing about this right now. Clearly it’s still a triggering experience.)

When it came time to present to the client, my team’s concept was relegated to third place in the pecking order. It’s not actually the worst position to be in, strategically-speaking (the second concept is usually the sacrificial lamb, or more equitably, the sacrificial plant-based-protein). So when my team’s concept received positive feedback from the client and made it into the next round of revisions, I felt somewhat vindicated.

HA. Take that, misogynistic CCO.

My victorious feelings didn’t last long, though. The day before we were supposed to fly back up to the client to present the revised concepts before taking them into consumer testing, I was asked not only to present my own team’s work, but the other team’s, as well.

No, “asked” is actually too nice of a word. I was told that I would be presenting their concept revisions, and that I had better get on board with them in the next 12 hours. I was also told that I was not allowed to ask any questions, or make any edits to the scripts, despite many of the punchlines still being visibly male-skewed. I just had to shut-up and be the mouthpiece for work that I knew was ethically wrong.

I remember being nauseous and gritting my teeth through the entire trip. During the presentation to the client, I tried to subtly communicate that “this isn’t mine, I’m just reading what was given to me, haha!” through body language and tone-of-voice as much as possible. But I still took the brunt of the client’s critical feedback, of course, because when you’re the tokenized stand-in, you only get the blame for what’s wrong, not the credit for what’s right.

I left that meeting feeling utterly used. Both concepts needed more work before going into testing, but they were now both also considered my problem to deal with. The freelance team was thanked for their work, overpaid for their underwhelming ideas, and let off-the-hook to find their next assignment. My team, on the other hand, was left to clean up the mess.

We did the best we could, all things considered, yet the male CCO held fast that the humor in the duo’s concept wasn’t sexist, and decided to put the concepts into consumer testing with only minor edits. “We’ll let the data tell us what’s working and what’s not,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, the third-party focus group data showed that my team’s concept (yep, I was territorial and am not sorry about it) was better received by the target audience than the freelance team’s. It scored higher on recall, relatability, and purchase intent, among other things. But because the CCO had always liked the other concept better, the data suddenly wasn’t important. “We’ll tone down some of the jokes if we have to,” he said. “The focus group was probably skewed, anyway.”

I left the agency three weeks later.

Less than a year after that, they lost the whole account.

It’s been 5 1/2 years since that happened, and 4 1/2 since I left consumer advertising altogether to work in the nonprofit advertising and marketing world. I’ve encountered much less bias here, although it hasn’t been absent altogether.

My perfectionism and worthiness-proving tendencies were still hard-wired into how I operated in my first few years at my current agency, especially as the first female executive. I had a different background than many others on the team, having worked in CPG (consumer packaged goods) for my entire career up until that point—and while I saw my “outside perspective” of the nonprofit world as a positive quality (and even part of reason I was brought-on), it felt like not everyone agreed.

When I proposed different strategic approaches or operational practices, I often encountered feedback of “that’s not how nonprofits work” or “we don’t do things that way,” chipping away at my confidence while simultaneously making me dig my heels in harder. I also received direct criticism that I was too “aggressive,” and “not trusting of other people to do their jobs,” which any female will tell you is code for “you speak up too much.”

Maybe I took those comments too personally. Maybe some of them weren’t ill-intentioned, just ill-considered. But maybe I was also on the receiving end of a system that didn’t yet know how to support a strong-willed and ambitious female lead, and in turn, saw me as a threat. In my first two years here, I worked myself to the point of a mini-mental breakdown because I was trying to do everything and be everything to everyone to prove that I deserved to be there, while simultaneously watching my tone, and trying to decipher when I needed to acquiesce to someone else so as not to rock the boat. That mini-breakdown (coupled with my dad passing away around the same time—you know, nothing major) led to a lot of personal unlearning, re-learning, self-discovery, and self-acceptance work that I continue to do this day.

—

Re-examining my own experiences has made me much more aware of the challenges and biases that others face, and how despite everything I’ve encountered in my own career, I still hold a position of privilege—and have a responsibility to use that privilege to break down barriers that may not directly affect me, but significantly affect those at other cultural, racial, sexual, and gender-based intersections.

Here’s another thing I’ve recognized, and it’s a hard one to admit: my personal and professional friendship circles were 97% straight and white until four or five years ago. That stark reality didn’t hit me until I started working with nonprofits.

While the NPO industry is just as notorious for its lack of diversity as advertising is, my experience (so far) has been that there are far more people of color, and of marginalized communities, in organizations working to end racial injustice, domestic violence, and educational imbalance than there are working to sell paper towels. Maybe it’s because nonprofit missions are generally fueled by the people who identify with the communities they impact most. I imagine (but can’t know firsthand) that there’s likely a greater inherent sense of belonging for a transgender male working at an LGBTQIA+ rights organization, for example, than there may be for the same individual at an agency with pickup truck accounts. And while having such a specific place to belong to is wonderful, it’s also limiting. It creates isolated pockets of diversity within each issue space, rather than fluid cultures of it across the industry as a whole. It wasn’t until I had a chance to work with a cross-section of social issues and nonprofits that I recognized how monolithic my own circle, and in turn, my own perspective, had been.

So yes, I was part of the problem.

Maybe I still am, looking back on this piece and seeing how much of what I’ve written is about me.

I am a middle-class, college-educated, cis-gendered, straight white woman.

I have been the recipient of sexism and ageism, but I have never been the recipient of racism, or ableism, or bias based on sexual orientation.

I do not know what those experiences are like personally.

But I’ve come to a point in my own journey where I believe that what I experienced for most of my career was not “imposter syndrome.” It was not all in my head, nor is it anyone else’s. Constantly having to prove yourself has a profound impact on your mental and emotional health. And it takes a lot of work to undo all that damage. (If you want to read more about this, there’s a fantastic article by the author of Inclusion on Purpose, Ruchika Tulshyan, and Jodi-Ann Bury, in HBR.)

Now, when I hear about the experiences of others, I don’t question whether or not they “took something too personally,” or interpreted it out of context. Whether it was intentional or a misunderstanding. None of that matters. If someone tells you about what they’ve endured, and how it makes them feel, I choose to believe them.

I love the way Brené Brown puts it:

Empathy is a way to connect to the emotion another person is experiencing; it doesn’t require that we have experienced the same situation they are going through.

Every experience is real to the person experiencing it. It’s our responsibility to hear their stories, to recognize and validate their emotions, and to do the necessary work to change inequitable systems as allies, supporters, and advocates.

My agency, I think, has come a long way in the last few years, working to create an environment that welcomes and values different backgrounds and perspectives, rather than seeing them as “outsider” points of view. Much of our progress was fueled by the racial reckoning in 2020, which put a spotlight on how we, as an agency serving diverse nonprofits, weren’t very diverse ourselves. We’ve done a lot of internal DEI work since then, and have made great strides in resetting our hiring practices, as well as our cultural norms, to be more representative and inclusive from all angles. Our leadership team has also expanded to include more voices and points-of-view, although we still lack racial and ethnic diversity at the top.

Are we perfect? No.

Are we learning and trying to do better, each and every time? I believe that we are.

Am I perfect? No.

But I’m getting closer everyday to accepting that I don’t have to be. And I am doing my best to let others know that they don’t have to be, either. They don’t have to constantly work harder or longer than anyone else to prove their worth, or earn the right to belong where they are.

They already belong there.

Period.