37 Women Who Are Disrupting the Status Quo and Championing Gender Diversity in Advertising and Tech, AdWeek
Celebrating top female leaders in media and marketing
It should come as a shock to no one that there is a serious lack of gender diversity in C-suites across the country. Currently, just over 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by a female CEO, while only 19 percent of their senior management positions are held by women. In the advertising industry, a mere 11 percent of creative directors are female.
So what exactly is being done to fix this glaring gender gap—and, more importantly, who’s stepping up to fix it? Read on to find out about 37 of the women who are taking on that crucial task and disrupting the status quo.
—Emma Bazilian
Piera Gelardi and Christene Barberich
Co-founders, ecd and global editor in chief, respectively, Refinery29
In 2005, four friends set out with a $5,000 investment to launch a fashion-focused online city guide called Refinery29. Under the leadership of two of those co-founders, global editor in chief Barberich and ecd Gelardi, Refinery29 has since become a global media powerhouse with an audience of 500 million and, as of last October, a reported valuation of half a billion dollars. The lifestyle site has also become a key part of the female millennial lexicon. “We often hear people say that Refinery29 is their cool best friend or older sister. … These young women have gravitated toward Refinery29 because they see themselves represented in our content,” says Gelardi. Meanwhile, Barberich and Gelardi are spearheading initiatives like The 67% Project, which encourages the representation of a wider array of female body types, and Shatterbox Anthology, which seeks to get more women behind the camera by producing short films directed by the likes of Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. “Twelve years on, it’s more and more exciting to find new and important ways to have content in all its forms push critical female agendas forward,” adds Barberich. —Emma Bazilian
See full list here.