Campaign published an interview with WPP CEO Mark Read that was likely written and/or reviewed by the White holding company’s PR and legal departments. When asked about the JWT sex discrimination lawsuit, Read coughed up the following:
CAMPAIGN: JWT, now part of Wunderman Thompson, lost a recent employment tribunal case which found that two male creative directors were unfairly made redundant “because of their sex”. What has WPP, the parent company, learnt from this case and do you really plan to appeal the ruling as Wunderman Thompson has said?
READ: The events did take place three years ago at JWT since when we’ve merged the agency and changed the leadership. I am not going to comment on the specifics of that case but I would reiterate that we seek to run our business in a way that doesn’t discriminate against anyone in the company on any basis and that would be my commitment.
CAMPAIGN: Jo Wallace, a creative director, who got caught up in the JWT case but was not directly involved, gave an interview to Channel 4 News after the tribunal in which she talked about how it might take 100 years to close the gender pay gap. And if we look at WPP’s published gender pay gap figures for the UK, some of them do seem to have moved very slowly (median gender pay gap was 17.5% in 2020 vs 17.6% in 2019). This is relevant because you talk in these results about how diversity, inclusion and sustainability metrics are now part of the compensation scheme for senior leaders at WPP. So how do you drive change faster?
READ: It’s important to me and to our board that we’re clear on our expectations for our leaders that we expect them to build an inclusive culture in their company and the make-up of our workforce should reflect the societies in which we operate.
I think about it in two ways: Representation – do we represent the society in which we live in terms of gender, race and other metrics? – and belonging – do the people who work for us feel they belong in our company?
Both representation and belonging are things that we are increasingly measuring and we seek to put them in our people’s incentive plans to remind them it’s important and to reward and motivate them to make progress. I think we have to do that and can do that without discriminating on any basis.
If you look at the gender composition of our workforce, we’ve made very good progress on Hampton Alexander metrics [for senior female leaders] and we have some progress on the ethnic make-up of our workforce in the US and the UK – but we recognise we’ve got more to do on both.
Wow, that’s some pretty slick dodging on Read’s part. To distance himself by claiming “the events did take place three years ago” is pathetic. After all, Read orchestrated the merger between JWT and Wunderman. Did he believe that combining two White advertising agencies—historically dominated by White men—would create a DE&I Nirvana?
Read’s dual objectives—representation and belonging—spotlight the abject failure of the CEO and board. Regarding gender and racial equality, he admits “we recognise we’ve got more to do on both”—despite having been with the corporation when it proclaimed that the staffers “represent perhaps the most diverse example of diversity of any single organisation.”
Most outrageous is Read’s contention that belonging—which he defined by asking, “[D]o the people who work for us feel they belong in our company?”—is being measured. It would be interesting to learn exactly how the measurement is executed and recorded.
The easiest thing to measure is the increasing amount of bullshit excreting from Read’s mouth.
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