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This Saatchi & Saatchi Chairman Was Just Suspended For His Comments About Women

He reckons sexism is over.

Kevin Roberts, the boss of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi has come out with some interesting statements. He’s basically implied that the fact that women don’t have many of the top jobs at the company is fine because a) the gender equality struggle is over and b) women are happy judging themselves to different standards to men.

Whaaaat?

He told Business Insider that the gender diversity debate within the advertising industry is “all over” and that women are saying to themselves, “we are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by”.

What does he mean? He means that men are the powerful and ferocious dinosaurs powering their way up to the top of their careers while women are stuck in lower positions than men within the advertising industry; ambitionless and content. Or rather, he said they do have ambition, but “not a vertical ambition”, but “intrinsic” and “circular”. Which basically means they’re not going anywhere.

We especially like how he’s used the word “idiotic” as though to empower the women he’s speaking for, like ‘heyyy, women are so happy in lower positions that they think men are idiots for doing well in their careers’.

Sorry to break it to you, KEV, but we’re pretty sure you can’t define a whole gender as having one type of ambition. Within every workplace there are people that like to sit back and enjoy the ride rather than focus on climbing the office hierarchy, but we’re pretty sure those people are a type of PERSON, rather than just ‘women’.

Since those comments have been released, Kevin has been under fire from many critics and has been put on leave by Saatchi & Saatchi. On Saturday, the company released a public statement saying that “the issue of gender diversity is not in any way over for our industry” and that, in contrast to Kevin’s statement, they are still striving to achieve it.

Kevin Roberts has seriously made us doubt that advertising is a fun industry for women to be going into. Unless the people at the top make some changes, being a female advertiser looks about as appealing as green ketchup. (Do you guys remember that?! That was gross.)

To sum up, if men are dinosaurs, women are dinosaurs too, cos we’re all made of the same stuff. Hell, women have had to put up with so much stuff over the years that we’re effing T-Rexes by now. And if people like Kevin don’t start acknowledging that then, in the words of Katy Perry, “you’re gonna hear [us] roar”.

- Emily Hooley

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