Mad Women
Kaplan felt she had no choice but to take a job in a smaller department where she didn’t see much of a future for herself. “I thought I was going to ‘mommy-track’ myself,” she says. But “I needed to get into a position where I didn’t have to travel a lot.”
“Mommy-tracking”—the desire to stop traveling, scale back, or quit to have a family—is one of the reasons most frequently given for the dearth of women on the creative side of advertising. Less than 12 percent of creative directors at award-winning agencies nationwide are female, and that’s actually an improvement from a decade ago, when women made up a measly 3.6 percent.
Recent analysis, however, shows that so-called mommy-tracking is far less common than once believed. Two surveys of high-achieving women—one conducted by Deloitte in the early ’90s, and another by researchers at Hunter College and the Harvard Business School last year—found that 11 percent or less of women left the workforce to care for children full time, a far smaller share than previously thought. The Hunter and HBS analysis also found that when women did leave the workforce, it was because of the way they felt they were perceived at work after they had children. Many women reported feeling “stigmatized for taking advantage of flex options or reduced schedules,” and believed they were “passed over for high-profile assignments, or removed from projects they once led.”
It was this kind of marginalization that Kaplan feared when she begged off the high-profile Reebok account, and instead raised her hand for a job in the agency’s smaller direct-marketing department so she could stay near her young son. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it. Jack Connors only cares about television, you’ll never get back into the mainstream,’” Kaplan remembers.
After her conversation with Mullen COO Joe Grimaldi, Kristen Cavallo had to make a decision: remain at the company, where she no longer felt valued, making $18,000 a year, or accept the job at Arnold and the opportunity to win the Volkswagen account.
So Cavallo took her extraordinary talent for walking into a room of often mostly male corporate execs and selling them on her vision to Arnold. She not only received a $20,000 raise, but also successfully pitched the Volkswagen account and helped develop one of the agency’s most successful campaigns ever: Drivers Wanted. The campaign kept the German automaker from deserting the U.S. market and helped solidify Arnold’s reputation as a force on the national stage.
You could argue that her negotiation was a simple case of market dynamics: Mullen didn’t recognize Cavallo’s value, so she took her talents to a place that did. Mullen lost out, and Arnold was rewarded when Cavallo helped create one of the most iconic ad campaigns of the past 50 years. I got the distinct impression, though, that the episode took a psychic toll on Cavallo, looming over her for the rest of her career. Where she had once been confident and up-front about asking for what she needed, later, and in spite of her many successes, she became timid and reluctant to do so. It’s something she admits herself, when she tells the story of how she ended up, years later, back at Mullen.
Cavallo eventually left Arnold to start a family and then went on to great success at other agencies. It had been 17 years since she had walked out of Jim Mullen’s office feeling “not very important” when Mullen CEO Alex Leikikh appeared out of the blue and urged her to return to the place where it all began. In the years since, Cavallo—now remarried with a second child—had settled in Virginia. She wanted the position, but she didn’t want to uproot her family for the sake of a job. So instead of asking for what she needed, she simply turned the job down.
It was Leikikh who initiated the negotiations, floating the idea of flex time. Would Cavallo take the position, he asked, if it meant she had to spend only three days in Boston, and could spend the other two in Virginia working from home? She accepted his offer—but, she says, she never would have proposed the arrangement herself. “I didn’t have the courage to ask,” Cavallo says. “Either I didn’t think I was worth it, or I didn’t think it was conducive to the business world. I also probably worried, ‘Are people going to think I’m taking advantage of the system? Is it going to breed resentment?’”
Lucky for her, Mullen wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Pam Hamlin took Fran Kelly’s advice and skipped graduate school to take up golf. And in a way, it paid off: Hamlin became the first woman in Arnold history to run the Spalding sporting-goods account. “I realized that the client that I was working with was not in the office from May until October,” Hamlin says, “and if we were going to get anything done related to advertising I needed to be where he was, which was the golf course.”
Spalding was just one account, though. “To be perfectly honest,” she admits, somewhat reluctantly, “I think that golf is less of a part of business today. But in those earlier years, I found it incredibly helpful because I was spending more time with my clients outside of business, and that’s where a lot of meaningful relationships are built—outside of the day-to-day meetings, the day-to-day calls, so it was really helpful in terms of the relationship side of our business relationships.”
Hamlin does not say it, but it’s hard not to wonder if the suggestion implicit in Kelly’s advice, that having a family should factor into her decision, had a bigger impact on her career than the choice to learn golf. I got the sense that even today—as she sits at the top of Arnold’s corporate hierarchy—Hamlin is trying to combat the narrative that her family might take precedence over her career because she’s a woman and a mother.
It doesn’t. “I really think this notion of work-life balance, quite frankly: It’s crap,” Hamlin says. “It suggests you have two lives. You don’t. You have one life. And if you really want to make the most of it, you’re going to prioritize what’s important to you.”
What is important to her is her job. “I absolutely love what I do, and I always tell people you have to be doing something that you love to be able to leave your children in the morning, or travel for a couple of days. You need to feel a great level of fulfillment in your professional life.” Great childcare, she adds, is also essential, whether it’s grandparents, daycare, or a nanny. “You need to feel that your children are well cared for. And, whatever that environment is, it needs to be an environment that you want your kids to grow up in, because if you don’t have that you won’t be effective in your professional life.”
In Hamlin’s mind, there was never a question that her career would be her top priority. “I don’t think I could have stayed home,” she says. “For me, personally, I really feel a great charge and fulfillment in being around smart, talented people, looking at clients’ business problems and solving them through creativity. And maybe it sounds cliché, but I think I’m a better mother when I’m happy in that way.”
Her eyes well up as she recalls an exchange she had with her son about a year ago. “There are plenty of times where you feel guilty that you have missed something in school, or haven’t been to every sporting event,” she says, but her family gets it. “He said, ‘You really love your job, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘I really love my job.’”
Kaplan, Cavallo, and Hamlin are loath to be compared to one another—they are different ages and at different stages of their careers—but they share an impulse to put a positive spin on the obstacles they’ve faced coming up in the industry. They don’t complain, and they don’t feel sorry for themselves. Quite the opposite: Kaplan, for her part, maintains that “mommy-tracking” herself was actually great for her career.
That job she took in Hill Holliday’s smaller direct-marketing department, she says, “turned out to be the best job I had the whole time I was here, because it taught me operational skills I never would have gotten if I was running a big account.” For the first time, Kaplan had responsibility over a profit-and-loss statement—and that was experience that would prove critical years later when she was promoted to her first agencywide position.
Kaplan’s success, it bears noting, was atypical. Most women don’t end up the chairman and CEO at their company after deliberately taking themselves out of high-profile positions to make more time for their families. She pulled it off, but not because she had any kind of female role model. The closest thing she had was a woman a few years ahead of her in her career. Kaplan remembers breaking down in front of her shortly after returning to work from maternity leave.
“How do you do it?” Kaplan sobbed.
“You just do it,” she recalls the woman saying, staring straight at her. “Instead of sitting around wringing your hands like, ‘What’s my plan and my strategy?’ and ‘I need to put a binder together on how to manage all this!’—you just do it. You just take one day at a time and you just figure it out.”
The thing is, role models, sponsors, mentors—whatever you want to call them—are key to “figuring it out.” And that’s especially true for young women. A recent survey conducted by Bain & Company of more than 1,000 men and women at a variety of career levels asked them two questions: first, whether or not they aspired to top management within a company. And second, whether they felt confident they could reach it.
At the start of the study, researchers found that women who were starting their careers answered yes to both questions at the same rate or a slightly higher rate than men. Two years into their careers, though, women’s aspirations dropped by 60 percent, while men’s stayed the same. Not only that: Women’s confidence in themselves eked up only slightly by the time they reached senior management, while men’s confidence almost doubled over the same period. The study’s authors attributed the change in aspirations and confidence to the fact that the longer women spent at a company, the less likely they were to feel as though they fit into that company’s image of a perfect employee.
Mentored by men, Kaplan, Hamlin, and Cavallo were all at a loss to name a single woman who had actively sponsored them on their way to the top. That’s why their appearance onstage at Boston University that night in February—even if it was only to offer nuggets like, “Be curious, open, and collaborative,” “Show off a ‘make it happen’ attitude,” “Be opinionated, hungry, and humble”—was an important step. And it’s why it is essential that they and other successful female executives speak as candidly as possible about how they made it: the mistakes they made, the bad advice they took, and the ways they failed.
No one woman, or any three women, can be held up as the perfect model for success, but the more women who shine a light on their path to the top of the business world so the rest of us can see, the better.
