Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This time on the show, we look at women who work in advertising.

It's a popular industry for women, but a tiny minority make the creative decisions that put ads on screens.

Billions of consumers take in marketing messages largely created by men.

And those messages tend to influence us a lot more than we think, but changing the status

quo means tackling the culture at ad agencies.

I feel like advertising is broken and that the things we value and prize and the way we try

to demonstrate our worth to clients is so

off and no one is getting left the world of big ad agencies

in the late 90s to go freelance. She was a copywriter back then. These days, she's

creative director of her own agency, Maternal Instinct.

She also founded and runs the 3% Conference, which aims to increase the numbers of women in high-level creative jobs in advertising.

She started to notice the gender imbalance in the industry quite a while ago.

One incident at a former employer has always stuck in her mind.

We were pitching the Saab car account, and the entire pitch team, except for one team member, was male.

So they had 16 men and one woman pitching this car account.

And also, I want to add that everyone on that team, except for the one woman, she was Asian, everyone was white.

So it was this white male lineup trying to win a piece of business from the Swedes, which, you know, if you know anything about cultural bent, you know, that's a nation that's a lot more progressive than many.

They did not win the account, for whatever reason.

Years later, Kat started the 3% conference to ask why 97% of creative directors are men

and what the industry can do to change that.

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