In the Gender Equality minefield, men should dance lightly

They (we’ll come back to who ‘they’ are later) used to say that “it pays to advertise.” As I write this article, one high-powered advertising executive – Saatchi & Saatchi CEO, Kevin Roberts, is possibly reviewing that sentence. And probably his pension plan. Right behind “it pays to advertise” in the queue for the cliché abattoir, you might recognise another old friend: “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” If Mr Roberts wishes to carry on believing that, he may be well advised to stay away from Twitter for a while.

You don’t need to be a creative genius to imagine some of the feedback that others have generously found time to offer Mr Roberts. The inverse relationship between the status of organisational positions and the percentage of them held by women, the pay gap between men and women, and the responsibility of leaders to promote and enhance inclusivity were just three emerging themes. Reading a cross-section of these earlier today, there is definitely a failure of leadership issue at play in his comments (which first appeared in a magazine called, now perhaps ironically, Business Insider), although perhaps this failure is more nuanced and detailed than the heat of the current debate suggests.

It is, of course, not just sexist but hugely naïve of Mr Roberts to speak of women lacking ‘vertical ambition’, but it felt even more naïve of him to go on to say: