Rivero: Ya alcanzamos 11% de mujeres en puestos de Creative Director en las agencias
For Bernadette Rivero, Co-Founder and President at Cortez Brothers you can’t talk about the role of women in advertising without hard numbers and exact data. “Thanks to the 3% Conference we know that we’ve arrived at a point where about 11% of Creative Directors in U.S. ad agencies are women, but the question still remains: How many of those are Latinas?” Rivero leads a production house and she remembers gender inequality back in the year when she worked as camerawoman, which led her to design the app, Crew It. “That gives us the primary benefit of having our crew members’ information handy when we need it, but also shows us the exact number of Latin women on our productions at any given time. Said that, we can have specific conversations, instead of general ones, in our production office every time we crew up for a shoot.” She noted that having data is a way in which the industry can promote gender equality. “We don’t even have the vocabulary necessary to talk about the issue of Latinas in the U.S. advertising industry, and we can’t measure the success -or lack of it- of any initiative until we know how many of us are there in the first place. I’m the President of a production company, not a statistician, but if I have the gift of producing something other than filmed content it would be the exact number of Latin women Creative Directors, Art Directors, Writers, Broadcast Producers, Broadcast Directors and Latina-owned production companies here in the U.S.” The United States and the advertising industry are going through moments where the role of women are part of daily conversations. “The difference the U.S. Hispanic advertising industry, is that a lot of times we’re talking about the intersection of being both women and Latina: a minority within a minority.”