I was reading about the Forbes ranking of the top 100 most powerful women in the world. Sonia Gandhi at 13th, Chanda Kochhar at 20th & Kiran Mazumdar Shaw at 92 were the only Indians featured there. And I started thinking about the time I joined advertising, when the media space in India was dominated by women – Ketaki Gupte, Kalpana Rao, Ambika Srivastav, Apurva Purohit, Jasmine Sorabhji, Meenakshi Madhvani. And all wonderful examples of breaking the corporate glass ceiling the old fashioned way – they just went & earned it.
Advertising has always been labeled the “great equalizer” of an industry – the great melting pot where failed doctors mixed with literature majors who worked with art school grads who didn’t want to work with Chemistry buffs. All thrown together by chance, but thrived in an environment of crackling innovativeness fueled by attitude, self-belief & sheer audacity – we dare to think & be different.
The advertising scene was (& probably still is) about male creative stars like Piyush Pandey, Balki, Prasoon Joshi, Ravi Deshpande, et al, with Indian advertising’s Larry King (Alyque Padamsee) always in the background. But the media departments in most (if not all) major ad agencies were headed by women. And it was a scenario that didn’t raise either sexist or feminist eyebrows; it was just a “matter of fact” situation. The timing might have been just fortuitous, for all of them to be in their respective positions at the same time. The advertising business seemed ahead of its time to me then, for it indicated a triumph of “ability” over the prevalent prejudices & the ubiquitous “glass ceiling”. And considering the media monies they managed, they sure were the most powerful individuals in probably the entire marketing space.
I am not sure how balanced the gender equation is in advertising today, and don’t know if it even matters that much. But whilst reading the Forbes list, I couldn’t help but wonder how it’d be if there were other industries went through a period of time where the power balance stood so clearly in favour of the “fairer sex”.
Posted by narayananrajgopalan (Naari) 
