Token Man is an initiative to give men a better understanding of the challenges women face in our industry, for greater empathy when they’re in the minority.
By encouraging men to join the discussion about the gender diversity issue and broaden their understanding we hope to inspire individual behaviour change that fuels a cultural shift in the workplace, enabling men to contribute in a tangible way to the movement for gender equality.
As founder of Creative Social I have hosted many events, often discussing the issues and opportunities that face the creative industries. But it wasn’t until I found myself the only man at a dinner with 13 senior female Creative Directors, that I was able to truly appreciate the reality of gender inequality and how tough it can be to be in a minority.
Not only was it a situation that was completely foreign to me, but I suddenly found I had less confidence to speak up and was surrounded by conversations I had no affinity with. This sparked the idea for the Token Man initiative.
However, the true catalyst for making something happen was finding myself at the end of finger pointing and realising that this is not going to bring about the change in men’s attitudes. Sitting down with Emma Perkins, who was one of my colleagues at the time, made me realise that the most useful conversation we could have was a balanced one in which we can speak openly without pressure of saying something wrong. And it was this conversation that acted as the trigger for the two of us to make Token Man a reality.
The aim of Token Man is to take men on a journey and help them understand the problems that are inherent in most organisations today and make them part of the solution rather than treating them as a problem.
The first thing we realised is that we needed a bigger team. Everything we have achieved to date has been in our own time and we knew we needed help. It was at this point that we brought in Georgia Barretta, who coincidentally is now a CD at Cheil herself and Penny Othen, a freelance marketing and social media consultant who helped us bring the initiative to life from design to the website to the overall strategy. It has definitely been a team effort.
Emma kicked it off by interviewing her then Group CEO, Richard Warren. From there we had a platform to recruit more interviewers and have been lucky to have some great people step forward to do, in many cases, their first ever interviews with men they have identified as changemakers themselves (although some also interview the men that have been nominated by previous Token Man). We are super grateful to all our interviewers which include Bridget Beale (Managing Director at BIMA), Sally Henderson (co-founder, Pello), Diane Young (MD at the Drum), Kat Gordon (Founder of 3% conference), Caitlyn Ryan (ECD at Cheil) and Eloise Smith (ECD at MullenLowe Profero).
My favourite interview has been the one with Karen Blackett but that’s simply because it was the first interview that I was able to do myself rather than simply sitting on the sidelines and managing the process. It gave me an appreciation of the hard work that goes into getting an interview right and making sure the most important questions are asked and answered. Karen is super inspirational and it was fantastic to hear about some of the things she has been doing at Mediacom which are really smart.
The truth is though I find value in each of the interviews as I am always learning something new and it is good to see some of the good work that is already happening. If you are interested, here is an overview of the best bits from the interviews so far.
The gender pay gap is a really complex one and unfortunately cannot be answered with one single answer. There are a number of factors that contribute which include the increased propensity for men to ask for a pay rise, unconscious bias, lack of flexible working for parents, impact of maternity leave and evidence to suggest that women are less likely to do training after becoming a mother.
Fortunately the gap is closing which is really important, especially when it comes to parents. Childcare in the UK is one of the most expensive in the world and this consequently puts pressure on the breadwinner to continue working following childbirth. As more and more women earn more than their male counterparts, it should hopefully encourage more men to take longer paternity leave (according to NABS only 2% of parents took up shared parental leave during the year following the legislation change) and help change the ratios at most senior levels as well.
Top Tips For Hiring a Diverse Workplace
1. Recognise that change requires a short term investment. Investing a few % margin points over the next few years will lead to significant increases in the long term
2. Stop thinking about recruiting for individual roles and recognise that your business is built up of teams. Once you understand this you will recognise that sometimes positive discrimination is the best decision for the business. The idea of best person for the role is out-dated
3. Make sure that everyone who either recruits or does appraisals has unconscious bias training. Also implement procedures so that you can spot unconscious bias where it slips through the net
4. Make everyone in your business a hacker. If everyone is constantly thinking ‘How can I make this better’ and make small changes, it can make a massive difference to the business
5. Find new tribes. In order to create diversity you need access to diverse people on an ongoing basis which means mixing in different circles
We simply hacked together what we have being doing with Creative Social (we have been talking about becoming a hacker now for over two years), with what I have learnt from working with Hyper Island (‘Learning by Doing’), fueled with the key learnings from Token Man to create something that can inspire everyone in the workforce to make a difference tomorrow.
Proudest Moment
I am definitely most proud of the changes that have been made specifically by CEOs as a result of their interviews.
The fact that at least two women have been promoted to boards, two have had pay increases and one agency has changed its maternity policy as a result of their interviews is really quite amazing and makes us committed to inspiring even greater change.
What’s Next for Token Man
We would like to take Token Man to a much wider audience which incorporates the wider creative industries as well as brands and corporates. I just get the impression that corporates are more open right now to investing in gender diversity which is sad but I fear a reality. We have also been approached to write a book but would like to focus first on collecting more positive stories around how leaders and businesses are creating real change. The interview process will help us collect these but we also want to inspire our very own culture hacks and watch the impact they have within business.
Three ways to get involved really:
1. Volunteer for an interview or to host a dinner
2. Sign up to one of our events. If you are not a member tweet us @Token_man
3. Hire us to do one of our Gender Diversity workshops in your business
I can’t tell you how many people we have reached out to who have said to us ‘Nice idea but we are focusing on our thing.’ It is almost as if it is more important that their thing creates the change rather than the change itself happening. It was for this reason that we got together as a team (Nadya Powell, Jonathan Akwue, Laura Jordan Bambach and Alex Goat) to bring together the various initiatives we were doing to deliver something that we hope will inspire meaningful change across the creative industries. I am very proud of where we got to (you can download the final report here) and it proved that the key to true success is collaboration.
There are so many organisations doing some fantastic work across diversity and I am in awe of what Laura and Ale have done with SheSays and through the experiment and have only started to get exposure to the brilliant work that The Ideas Foundation are doing. Also been a huge fan of what James has been doing with Commercial Break.
At some point we also hope to link in with He For She which is also trying to get more men into the gender diversity discussion but clearly at a much larger scale.
Background
Token Man
Token Man on The Drum
As founder of Creative Social Daniele Fiandaca has hosted many events, often discussing the issues and opportunities that face the creative industry. But it wasn’t until he found himself the only man at a dinner with 13 senior female Creative Directors that he was able to truly appreciate the reality of gender inequality and how tough it can be to be in a minority. Not only was it a situation that was completely foreign to Daniele, but he suddenly found he had less confidence to speak up and was surrounded by conversations he had no affinity with. That sparked the idea for the Token Man initiative.
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Cheil
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