I love that Sam Cooke song and I’ve been humming it a lot recently. March hosts International Women’s Day on the 8th, and it’s for that reason we actively sought to look at professional development issues that are specific to women. A selection of marketers from client-side and agency life gave us an insight into their experience and offer advice on getting over the barriers.
I usually struggle to get women to talk about issues that are specific to our sex in the workplace. But for the first time I had comments to spare and really struggled keeping to my word count. That’s great, it means people are not afraid to talk about an issue that half the population face on a daily basis.
We’re also incredibly fortunate that Maria Burpee, EMEA healthcare marketing & strategy at Dell, flew over from Portugal to sit down with us and tell us how she manages being a B2B leader and a mum of two, soon to be three.
I am also pleased to announce our search for the industry’s Rising Stars is back for a third year. This year we were looking for mid-junior marketers in a bid to recognise the talent that is rising through the ranks and often doesn’t get credited in such a public way. In previous years the list has been exclusively for client-side marketers. This year we opened it up to agencies as well in a bid to recognise all the hard work that often happens behind the scenes. See who made it onto this year’s list.
Interestingly most of the nominations were for females, while this is encouraging it’s not entirely surprising as there are usually more women in junior positions. But as the levels of seniority increase, the number of women in the workplace decrease. But we can hope that the industry will continue to talk about, and act on, making the working environment fairer and more accessible to women, and in turn hopefully the Rising Stars of today will be the B2B leaders of tomorrow.
