How Much Did Women Make in Advertising

With one exception, not enough. Thanks, gender pay gaps.

Just the facts, ma’am? Go directly to the excel

Nine months ago a Creator posted in the anonymous industry app, Fishbowl, asking the participants of the Women in Advertising Bowl to share their salaries.

And boy (uh, girl), did they ever.

As a female, freelance Strategy Director, I found the range of salaries eye-opening. There were inspiring six-figure queens. There were insulting, rage-inducing low-ball numbers. The sharing of both poles, however, encouraged more than one woman to successfully lobby for better pay. Which got me thinking: organizing these comments into a clear data set could make it a better tool for women to get their due.

So I did what any Type-A feminist does on winter break: I binged romantic holiday movies and got drunk on rummy eggnog. And then, I spent three days manually coding and analyzing the 330+ salary posts, self-reported by the self-proclaimed female advertisers on Fishbowl.

Data included department, title, years of experience and city. I thought it would be useful to have a baseline to compare these salaries to; so, I pulled in the average Glassdoor salaries for each role in their respective city (when known) and calculated the pay difference from what women shared. Voila! Neurotic magic!