The other day I had something of an epiphany.
It was so big an idea, I was concerned I was having some kind of crisis, complete with delusions of grandeur.
I’ll explain a bit more.
When I started out as a young, fresh-faced copywriter in advertising it was tough to carve out a career path amongst a sea of bravado-wielding guys. Back then, women made up only a tiny sliver of creative departments (only 3% of Creative Directors were women) and it was tough to get my voice heard over the knob gags and jibes about me being ‘nice to have around as decoration’ – yep, something that was actually said to me in my first year on the job. 20yrs later, and my path well and truly carved, I may be a little battle-fatigued by my rise to the top, but not much has actually changed. Men still dominate ad agency creative departments. Massively so. According to this movement for change, two decades on, only 11% of Creative Directors are female, yet women still make up a massive 80% of consumer spending, controlling the world economy by over $20 trillion a year and are responsible for 60% of social media sharing. That’s a hell of a lot of d$llar not being sold to effectively.
So although now the guys are making their knob jokes more privately thanks to new stringent HR policies, they’re still disproportionately using their voices loudly out there, dictating our influences in the world. It's their words the world is reading on billboards, in magazines and on our screens and devices, setting the agenda for how we all live our lives.
Cut to the present day and our old friend, The Global Pandemic has left lots of women pushed out of jobs. Many are now carving out new career paths, setting up their own brilliant and empowering businesses from home.
But with that comes a need for good copywriting to help them sell themselves in the big wide world. Suddenly I’m getting calls from women in a tizz because they just aren’t confident about what they’re putting out there, even though these are the same women bossing every other aspect of their lives. They call me worried their web copy ‘is sh*t’ or their bios ‘don’t hit the mark’. They’re ‘getting their old boss’ to write stuff for them’ or ‘their husband to do it’, and I’ve been spending my time trying to cajole and convince them they can do it and not outsource their voice to a man.
And that’s when I had my first thunderbolt moment.
If all these brilliant women and their incredible businesses were being held back by a lack of confidence in their copy, maybe I could teach them the tricks I’ve learnt to give them that power back? Not only would it mean they wouldn’t need to hire me (because who better to talk about their own brand than them) but more importantly they wouldn’t have to hire or ask another guy to ‘speak’ for them again.
That’s when my even bigger epiphany happened.
(Yes, I went bigger.) If I could empower women to write their own marketing and content and make it more effective, then there’d be more strong, confident, POWERFUL female voices out in the world OWNING THAT SPACE. I mean, if I could give women the strategies to write with the clarity and power of a Greta Thunberg speech, what the hell could that do for their businesses? I could literally END THE PATRIARCHY! (See, I told you I went BIG.) So knuckled down and got to work ending World Gender Inequality by creating an online course dishing-out my copywriting knowledge for others to devour. No one else would have to go through 20yrs of ‘hard labour’ among the knob gags of adland learning the craft of selling. I’ve done that for them. Right now, there’s never been a better time for women to learn skills that’ll empower them out of the Covid Curse that’s knocked them sideways (and backwards.) As we've discovered, women’s careers have been hit hardest by the Covid sh*t show. Brutally so. This FT article warns it could’ve even set women back to the 1950s *sob!* But with so many brilliant women out there willing to share their knowledge, if we band together and skill-share ourselves out of the ashes, could we rise stronger and wiser than ever before?
They say knowledge is power. Then other women sharing their knowledge must surely be the ultimate power transfer. I’m a member of some incredibly supportive female-focused groups. They’ve been a lifeline in helping me learn new tricks, build confidence in my new business ventures and are million trillion miles away from the Willy Wangling of the past 20 years in adland.
There’s Doing It For The Kids – A Facebook group full to the brim of freelancing Mums bossing and selling and supporting each other day after day. Here
Then there’s The Robora run by Annie Ridout, the queen of empowering courses. She’ll teach you to become your own boss and create a course yourself. She even taught me. Here
And of course there’s my course: ‘Write with Power: The Copywriting Secrets That Will Give Your Words Impact' I might even add; '...and help you change the world!' to the end of the title, to reflect my absolute belief that courses like this can recalibrate the world. Here
For every ten places sold I’m going to donate a place to a woman that needs it but doesn't currently have the funds; a ‘Pay it Forward’ initiative I hope others could follow to help rebuild a better, more female-ccentric ‘new normal’.
Right now, women the world over are quietly getting their heads down learning from home and creating new businesses as they sit-out their furlough or redundancy period, waiting for the perfect moment to arise stronger than before. Those new skills bristling, eager to be unleashed.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a crazy epiphany I had after all.
In fact, it might just bloody work.
Look out world. The Matriarchy is coming.
We’re just getting our training in first...
'Write With Power: The Copywriting Secrets That Will Give Your Words Impact' launches today
For more details on the course click here
(Main Image: Kiana Bosman)
Comments