Women Don’t Need Your Campaigns – They Need Your Systems to Change
Every March, brands celebrate women. But there's a gap between celebrating women and actually serving them. And it's wider than most marketers want to admit, a provocative challenge. At McCann, we've been sitting with that challenge through Atomic Soup, our weekly ideas lab. Once a month we dedicate a session to inclusion, and the conversations around women and gender equity keep surfacing truths our industry needs to hear. Here are three.
Women's violence online isn't virtual anymore. It's becoming physical.
We uncovered this truth during our ‘Gender based online violence’ session, which explored what it means when men abuse AI girlfriends without consequences, and the idea that this virtual violence is a practice for the real world.
As one colleague pointed out: "Men see more women online than they do in person. And if all they're seeing is hypersexualized, objectified, or deepfaked versions of women, what does that teach them about how to interact with real women?"
When misogyny is wallpaper on the internet it's no longer a fringe issue and instead a pipeline to real-world harm. And if your brand benefits from the eyeballs that misogyny attracts, there are big questions around complicity and reach. Mainly, are you complicit in the algorithm that serves up misogyny or are you using your reach to interrupt the pattern instead of amplifying it?
Neurodivergent women are financially invisible. Your brand's complexity is actively excluding them.
Women with ADHD, autism, and dyslexia aren't opting out of the economy. They're being locked out by design, by complexities and lack of accessibility by design because the "noise" in financial services isn't a feature, it's a barrier.
As one colleague told us: "Interfaces aren't intuitive. Systems feel cold. Financial tools come with fine print, overwhelming alerts, and judgment baked into the UX. Many neurodivergent individuals aren't opting out of experiences. They're being locked out."
Given that neurodivergence affects 1 in 7 people globally and women are dramatically underdiagnosed compared with their male counterparts, financial products are failing to reach a large segment of the economy.
Structurally embedding accessibility by design and not as an after-thought will ensure that neurodiverse women can achieve financial inclusion. Brands that can offer solutions such as digital economy "noise-cancelling headphones" will be the ones who can engage this forgotten segment.
The invisible tax on being a woman in the modern world.
From safety and identity affirmation to mental health maintenance, women and LGBTQ+ women pay a hidden tax just to exist safely.
As a colleague shared about safety: "It's like having 2 brains running. One in the background, one in the foreground. You're constantly code-switching, constantly performing. It's exhausting."
And this isn’t just a mental tax, it has significant cost too. And when this is added to the many gaps women experience already (whether pay, pensions, career) it paints a pretty grim financial picture for women.
Campaigns often celebrate women's resilience, but few acknowledging the financial and psychological cost of that resilience. What if instead of celebrating women pushing through, brands found ways to help reduce the things women have to push through?
These truths point to the same gap between how our industry talks about women and what it actually builds for them. We celebrate resilience while quietly benefiting from the systems that make resilience necessary. The real IWD action isn't another campaign. It's closing that gap. And by all means then make a campaign about it once you’ve made the change, like we did with the gender pain gap for Nurofen. It's asking harder questions about complicity, about who our systems are designed for, and about what we're willing to change when the briefs stop rolling in. The brands women actually trust will be the ones who did something about it.
