Kasey Windels, the College's 2023 Teacher of the Year, has spent nearly two decades studying the lack of women in advertising agency creative departments, and she’s gearing up to recreate her initial study to see whether the numbers have improved.

It will be the third time she’s revisited the study, which started as a content analysis of award-winning advertisements from 1984, 1994 and 2004 and completed in 2006. At that time, she found only 6% of award winners were women. “It was appallingly low,” she said.

Windels became interested in the topic when she walked into her first meeting as an advertising agency intern while getting her master’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I looked around. I was the only woman in the room. It had never occurred to me that this was the case or this would be what was going on. In my classes, half or more of the students were women – even in creative classes.”

She looked for data and research on the topic but found none. “I ended up not wanting to live the experience of being that minority. I rolled into the Ph.D. program and started doing research on why there are so few women in this creative role.”

Her examination of award-winning ads in three decades showed 3% had a female creative director.

“Kat Gordon, founder of the 3% Movement, pulled that statistic from my dissertation and named her conference after it. Every year 1,000 people gathered at the 3% Conference to talk about how to get more women into these roles.”

Since Gordon started the movement, the number of female creative directors has increased from 3% to 12.6%, according to an article in TheDrum.com from March 2023.

“When you can see your research have an actual impact on the industry, that is so incredibly rare for that to happen,” Windels said. “They did an excellent job creating awareness for this. We need women in creative leadership.”

But Windels said she’s concerned about revisiting the study in 2024 because the number appears to ebb and flow, she said, and COVID didn’t help as people were laid off or left the workforce.

“I’m hopeful but realistic.”

Windels has also interviewed women to explore why women aren’t in the creative director role. One study found that women in ad agencies said the agencies were run by men who judged what is creative. “They would say: When I created something I thought was funny or spoke to women in a creative or interesting way, if the men didn’t deem it to be creative, it didn’t get through.”

She found that “the idea of creativity is very gendered within the agency, and it’s coded to be masculine, so the women within the agency are thought to be not as creative as the men. If there’s a man in the room, they will look to the man to see if what the women are saying is right, true, funny, creative. One two-women team said, ‘If I asked a male team to present my work to the creative director, he would accept it. But because it’s me presenting it, he questions it.”

Windels said she will keep beating the drum to see change. “Right now, we don’t have people pushing for that. We could assume this problem is solved. That’s why I want to continue doing that analysis every 10 years. This is still a problem.”

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