We partnered with SheSays Sydney and Women in Research (WiRe) to undertake a research project and design and facilitate a series of Think Tanks with senior women from the creative industries to investigate what happens to women over 35 in the creative industries – as there don’t seem to be many of them!
Our aim was to find out what the challenges these women face and how we can address them. This project had great importance because it was flagged that women in senior roles in the industry are the ones who affect change for younger women. But with so few senior women, the rate of change being led by senior men in the industry wasn’t fast enough to keep female talent in the industry.
The project started with an event featuring several deliberative focus groups discussing the challenges faced by women in the creative industries. The four groups consisted of:
- Young women in the first 1 – 5 years of their career in the industry with no plans to have kids
- Women around their thirties who were considering their options to have children
- Women from the industry who had had kids or were trying to conceive
- Young men and fathers in the industry
The event and subsequent qualitative research project that followed with research agency FiftyFive5 uncovered clear areas of discrimination and opened up discussion about what needed to change within the industry.
In response to the research project we began to run a series of Think Tanks at Facebook HQ in Sydney throughout 2015 to find ways to affect change.
Head of Positive Projects Ruby Lucas in an interview with Mediascope’s Denise Shrivell talking about women in media and advertising. Discussing findings from The Working Model project and what we can do to improve the situation for women working in the creative industries.
Filmed 4 March 2016.
