Maybe we should stop celebrating Women's Day

Author: Melanie Campbell managing partner at Hoorah Digital

I've read that stat block about six times now and I still don't know whether it's a good news story or a bad one. Maybe that's the point. Three different measures of progress, moving at three completely different speeds, and we tend to only talk about the one that's easiest to put in a slide.

So before another round of purple graphics and "proud to celebrate the women of..." posts lands in your feed today, I want to ask something less comfortable. What if the post is the easy part?

Agencies are genuinely good at proving campaign effectiveness for clients. We build entire decks around it. We are nowhere near as rigorous about proving the effectiveness of the systems that decide who actually gets to make the work in the first place. We'll measure reach, frequency, brand lift, all of it – and then in the same building, nobody's tracking who got put forward for the pitch, or whose name ends up on the awards entry versus whose analysis quietly made the winning idea possible.

I've sat in enough new-business war rooms across FMCG, alcohol and financial services accounts to know this pattern by heart. The person who did the strategic thinking is very often not the person standing up to present it. Sometimes that's fine – presenting is its own skill, not everyone wants the room. But often it isn't fine, it's just what happened, because nobody decided otherwise.

Here's a stat that bothered me more than I expected. In a study tracking roughly 30,000 management-track employees, women actually received higher performance ratings than men – and were still rated 8.3% lower on 'potential', and 14% less likely to be promoted. Not because of what they'd done. Because of what someone, somewhere, imagined they might do next.

'Potential' sounds objective when you say it in a calibration meeting. In agencies it tends to mean executive presence, commercial instinct, gravitas, client readiness – real things, sure, but none of them defined, all of them wide open to whoever the evaluator already had a picture of in their head before the meeting started.

There's one more finding I keep coming back to, maybe because it cuts against the industry's favourite story about itself. Researchers studying close to 700 people found that a group's collective intelligence had almost nothing to do with its smartest individual member. It correlated with social sensitivity and how evenly people got to speak. Diverse teams don't automatically produce better work – they only convert difference into value when the room actually lets it be heard, when a half-formed idea from someone junior can survive contact with a senior voice in the room. Representation is the input. Whether anyone's actually listening is the part that decides if it counts for anything.

To be clear – I'm not arguing Women's Day is pointless, or that any of this is performative by default. Dove's Let Her Grow campaign moved actual policy. Ariel's Share the Load shifted real behaviour at scale. Storytelling was never the problem. The problem is when storytelling gets asked to stand in for the decisions it was supposed to be evidence of.

There's a rough difference, I think, between recognition with nothing behind it, communication that actually points somewhere, and the harder work of changing who gets hired, promoted, paid and put forward. Most of what shows up in February is the first kind. It costs nothing and changes very little.
That's the standard I try to hold us to at Hoorah as well. Not a purple filter on the logo for a week – actually looking at who's getting the stretch briefs, who's being put in front of clients, whose name goes on the case study when the work lands. I don't think we've fully cracked it. But it's the thing I'd rather be judged on than the post.

So this year, before you hit post, maybe ask the less flattering question instead. Who got the stretch brief last quarter. Who presented work they didn't build. Whose name is on the entry, and whose thinking got them there.

Because the test was never who shows up in the Women's Day post. It's whose thinking makes it into the room where the decision actually gets made.