Is Your Brand In Diversity Oversteer?

As an advocate (maybe even an activist) for diversity and inclusion and been discriminated against or bullied in pretty much every job I’ve ever had I care greatly about these topics. Not just being a voice, but taking action for change. At the same time I do believe we are in a phase of ‘Diversity Oversteer’ and as much as many of us mean well we are creating a backlash that could be undoing all the good we have achieved.

There is a time and a place for activism and speaking up about topics that are being ignored and overlooked but I believe there is a time where we should move onto just living and breathing what we fight for rather than making lots of noise or falling into tokenism.

Virginia Haussegger AM, Director of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, at the University of Canberra and Chief Editor of BroadAgenda says "Gender equality progress in Australia is in trouble. Despite Australia's leadership in developing some of the best anti-discrimination legislative frameworks in the world, the current climate of bias and backlash is proving immune to regulatory control. Australian women and girls are failing to flourish as well as they should, particularly given our decade long world number one ranking in female education". Virginia was involved in the 50/50 study by the University of Canberra revealing that 88% of Australians agreed that inequality between women and men is still a problem in Australia today. Some segments of our population are more supportive of gender rights than others, but alarmingly 41% of Australian men believe that political correctness gives women an advantage in the workplace and 46% believe that gender equality measures do not take men into account.

The New York Times reported on a 40 year study by sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter that demonstrated the number of millennials who believe that "The husband should make all the important decisions for the family" has grown from 30% in 1994 to nearly 40% in 2014. The rate of decline is improving since then but we're still in trouble. We’re doing something wrong if this is where we’ve ended up.

Could it be that our activism and overly political correctness is causing this backlash? Could it be that brands are over-representing these issues and stepping into 'Woke Washing', tokenism or 'Purpose Washing'? How can we tell?

As reported by Ipsos MORI Australian’s believe that our population of Muslim’s is greater than it actually is. With many marketing campaigns putting token Muslim’s in their advertising, to be well intended in showing how diverse and multi-cultural we are, we are also likely to be over-representing a segment of the population. This over-representation in our marketing communications would only make the public think there are more here than there really are. Australian’s believe that there are 12% of the population who are Muslim, when it is 2.4% in fact, which is more in line with our indigenous population. We also know from Western Sydney University that nearly one in three Australians have negative feelings towards Muslim Australians, with 63% saying they would be concerned if a relative married a Muslim. This is a very scary indicator. Tokenism heightens the perception of reality of our actual population and could be a cause of this backlash and racism.

We often think that Australia is filled with Asians because we see many walking around our major cities in our day to day. The Australian tourism dollar with the Asian population is massive (and welcomed) and yet it may be giving us the impression that we are populated with more Asians than we really have. The majority of our immigrants here are actually from the UK and New Zealand and the Chinese immigrants only at just over 2%. We continue to over-represent Asians in our marketing in our attempts to be politically correct, and could be further fostering a false racism with many feeling we’re over-populating through immigration.

What about the fact that women are responsible for most purchasing decisions? Some report 85% and others even up to 91% of all purchases. Some consider this the 'female economy' and talk positively about this, but what if this is actually a backlash from past gender bias and a signal of 'Diversity Oversteer'? Women were traditionally relegated to matters of the home and therefore any purchasing aligned with these stereotypical roles. This dominance now extends to automotive at 65% of new cars and even more for all car purchases, investment decisions with 89% of bank accounts opened, 93% of food purchases, and 80% healthcare to name a few. With the population at nearly 50/50 women are actually over-represented in these categories. It would be easy for a marketer to think that this is where the audience is, so market to them exclusively. What we can do is perpetuate this bias even further and begin to be prejudiced and discriminatory against men too. Those ads we still can't help ourselves to produce show the woman appearing to be the 'together' one and the Dad the bumbling fool. We show the irresponsible man in the house who can't keep tidy or do the daily chores. Depicting men in this way is definitely in the area of Diversity Oversteer in my book, but so is perpetuating the new stereotypes. The facts don't make some things 'right'.

We need to be working on ways to equal the balance and marketers have a responsibility to prevent future discrimination because of our ability to influence society. Some will argue here that we are just reflecting the outside society, but I find that an ignorant and irresponsible attitude.

In our advertising we often like to demonstrate how inclusive we are and cast people in wheel chairs or with other obvious physical disabilities but the reality is that the population of people with disabilities is 21.5% psychosocial disabilities and the number in a wheel chair is surprisingly low overall. Misrepresenting society becomes tokenism.

The consequence for getting so much of this off track is that we are not representing the actual customer out there and we’re causing brand damage along the way. We are also creating new bias.

Agencies and marketers may be spending a lot of energy and focus on hiring policies and internal HR processes, however hardly any are thinking about the creative process or if they are they are missing the mark. With 85% of marketers in APAC believing that their organisations are creating advertising that avoids gender stereotypes, the reality is that 63% of consumers disagree and think advertising reinforces stereotypes. We're getting this horribly wrong and arrogant about it, on top. With those same women in charge of purchases feeling misunderstood by marketers across the board we're doing it all wrong.

There are solutions that all stem from breaking down our own beliefs and learning more about our unconscious bias including aligning our communications and strategies with the actual population count as the indicator of who our real audience is. We need to be mindful that where there is sales data showing us what seems like the current market segments that it may not be the potential audience and could be a limitation to growth. At the same time we can be perpetuating stereotypes and need to look to the future too. Think about the gaming industry over the years where people assumed that only men played these games and therefore only produced the kind of games that men and boys would like. The advertising creative and the channel selection just further fuelled this bias and the results were used to validate that this was the only market segment out there. It took Nintendo's search to find the real potential customer that brought the Nintendo Wii to market and a range of products for all ages and genders and with it came unprecedented success for Nintendo. There are many, many great examples of brands that have grown from throwing away stereotypes right back to product development stage.

Secondly, we need to be conscious of our marketing creative themes and language chosen and not just use token casting. Putting a female in a masculine themed concept doesn't make it gender diverse - it forces women into the wrong box and we just feel misunderstood all the more. At the very least if we use gender neutral communications and themes that sit well with both genders we are still communicating with existing audiences and no longer polarising the audiences we're missing.

Real acceptance and inclusion is actually invisible. It just is. It is so natural that there is no need to make a song and dance about it. Like in relationships the opposite of love is not hate. Hate and anger are the result of still being in love but hurt and acting out as a result. This is the same as our activist phase, loud ranting, and what we're now seeing as 'Purpose Washing'. The opposite of love is actually indifference. So too is true acceptance and inclusion - it is naturally representing our actual community without the fanfare and without reaction.

I'm certainly not advocating for doing nothing, or rolling over on important topics at all. But I do believe we're past this activist phase now and the population is acting out against it. It is time to move on from activism and focus on the doing. BE diverse and inclusive, don't fuss about it or fake it. Social proof will create a momentum and give those people sitting on the fence permission to stand up and do the right thing too.

It all starts with us changing how we market and produce the creative that we do.

Anne Miles is Managing Director of Suits&Sneakers, a global collective of some of the world's best strategic and creative talent for project based marketing and creative. Anne is a Conscious Capitalist and advocate for Diversity and Inclusion in the marketing and creative process. Anne offers a free (and ungated) checklist for producing gender neutral communications in order to bridge the gap between genders in our marketing creative here.

Sources:

The 50/50 by 2030 Foundation is a bold new gender equality initiative established by the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA), at the University of Canberra, Australia 

Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., is the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.”

The New York Times "Do Millennial Men Want Stay-At-Home Wives? by Stephanie Coontz March 31, 2017. A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 2017, on Page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Do Millennial Men Want Stay‐at‐Home Wives? 

Ipsos MORI StatistaCharts 'Out of every 100 people in your country, how many do you think are Muslim?'

Female Shopping: Various data sources, but this one above: www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/10783665/Womenomics-why-women- are-the-future-of-our-economy.html ^she-conomy.com/facts-on-women 

Gender Neutral: Referenced from Jane Cunningham & Philippa Roberts, UK Researchers and author of “Inside Her Pretty Little Head” and “The Daring BookforBoysinBusiness”. SummaryoftheworkofvariousUniversityProfessor’sandtheirresearchpapers.Seetheappendixattheendfor more information. 

Marketers belief in gender stereotypes: Research company Kantar study called the 2019 AdReaction Study