The ADC Discusses The Let’s Make the Industry 50/50 Initiative and 2017 Jury

Last week, the Art Directors Club, one of the world’s first non-profit organizations to champion commercial creativity and part of The One Club for Creativity, announced the Digital and Design juries for the global ADC 96th Annual Awards.

For the fourth year in a row, the club has followed through with The Let’s Make the Industry 50/50 Initiative founded to ensure diversity in the award show juries.

DIVERGE talked to Jennifer Larkin Kuzler, Director of Awards Programs at the Art Directors Club, part of The One Club for Creativity, New York

Where did the idea come from?
The Let’s Make the Industry 50/50 Initiative was founded by the Art Directors Club in 2013 with a mission to effect drastic and
measurable change as it pertains to the roles and participation of women within the creative industries. ADC created a call-to-action to the industry by setting a goal of equal participation for women and men on award show juries, boards of directors, and event panels and speaker lineups. Inclusivity is paramount to our mission.

The initiative was born out of a conversation between ADC and Cindy Gallop, a 50/50 Initiative founding committee member, as we endeavored to get more women involved in our community, beginning with our juries. We decided that we needed to make a public statement to hopefully inspire and hold organizations accountable for making a change in how they approached their programming.

We kicked off the creation of the 50/50 Initiative with a photo shoot in the ADC Gallery in NYC, where we put a call out to all female creatives in the area to come by to get in the picture. Too often we were hearing “but I don’t know that many female creatives” or “there just aren’t that many women in the industry” in response to why speaker lineups, juries, etc were so woefully unbalanced. We wanted to physically show that that simply wasn’t true. They weren’t nonexistent, they just weren’t always as visible as their male counterparts. With very little advance notice, we had over 150 women show up that day for the photo – it was amazing!

And I must add that we are incredibly lucky to have Mandy Gilbert, Founder and & CEO of Creative Niche  and Ale Lariu, Co-founder of SheSays on the committee. You won’t find two more dedicated, inspirational women to have on your team.

Why is gender equality so important at this award show?
We think it’s important for not only the ADC Annual Awards but all shows, as a balanced jury noticeably transforms the conversation in the jury room. The perceptions and interpretations are wonderfully shaken up, unconscious bias (hopefully) exposed and the work of the jury becomes part of a larger cultural and social conversation on creative communications.

 Is it difficult to pick a 50/50 jury?
It’s challenging to pick any truly diverse jury – culturally, regionally, and creatively speaking. You want the best cross section of talent in the room to evaluate and hold up the best from the vast array of work entered. In order to achieve a 50/50 gender balance, you have to sometimes dig a bit deeper, as female creatives are not always as visible. They simply don’t do as many public appearances because we find that they simply aren’t asked to do so as often as men. Once you open that door, you’ve opened a floodgate in the best possible way. It’s a clear cycle: when you increase exposure, you increase participation, which in turn increases exposure and awareness.

Do you think that this initiative has helped broaden the winners you shortlist in terms of diversity?
We hope that the diverse group of jurors invites a more diverse sample of work. That kind of evolution takes time, but we have seen and heard from our community that they are were inspired to become more active after seeing the jury makeup shift in this way.

Additional thoughts?
While achieving true gender equality in the creative industries (or any industry for that matter) is definitely a long game, there are tangible, effective things we can do right now to get that process started. If you don’t ask [women to join], the dynamic will never shift. If you don’t ask, they’ll never say yes. Female creatives need to embrace opportunity and not be tentative. After we began this initiative and had our first set of 50/50 juries later that year, one of the first (unsolicited) responses to this change came to me via the male jurors. They thanked me and the club for bringing such an amazing group together – it changed the way they viewed the work and how they viewed themselves in that kind of setting.