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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.”