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The chairman of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi has been put on leave controversial comments about women in advertising.
Kevin Roberts told Business Insider magazine that he didn’t think there was a gender problem in the advertising world.
He said that many women choose not to progress within companies. “We have a bunch of talented, creative females, but they reach a certain point in their careers, 10 years of experience, when we are ready to make them a creative director of a big piece of business, and I think we fail in two out of three of those choices because the executive involved said, “I don’t want to manage a piece of business and people, I want to keep doing the work.”
He went on to say that women were not driven by Darwinan urges of “wealth, power and fame” and that women’s ambition is not “vertical ambition. It’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy.”
Roberts accused gender equality campaigners such as Cindy Gallop of “making up a lot of the stuff to create a profile”.
Women make up just 13.5 per cent of senior creatives in Australia, according to the Communications Council’s latest salary survey.
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