The role of the university education in the creation of the social responsible advertising enterprise: the gender equality in the creative department

Paper submitted to the 2008 EFCCE Conference, Paris, 16-17 May 2008.In Spain, with the recent adoption of the law of effective equality between women and men, one of the social responsibility policies recommended is to achieve their equal promotion in the different professional groups and categories. This policy would be important, specially, in the commercial communication industry and, in particular, in the creative departments. The standard of an equal distribution by gender in the creative workgroups would compensate the absence of a legal or corporate norm which protects the participation of women, in equal opportunities to men, in the creation of the message. In this way, with the creative mixed workgroups, we would be able to promote the gender equality not only in the enterprises but also in the social environment for stimulating the role of women as “creative force” of the advertising message. Until now, for achieving a fair image of women in the mass media, the efforts have been focused on promoting the participation of women in the control of the message once created, (“censor force”), but not in their participation in its creation. So, the gender inequality in the core of the advertising industry (the creative department), would be able to perpetuate the sexist advertising in the mass media. In a prospective manner, this research pretends to know which department the future advertising workforce plan to go into, to assess, according to the results obtained, the need of adopting this measure of corporate social responsibility (a balanced distribution of women and men in the different professional groups). For this objective we have administered a questionnaire on work and family expectations to a sample of 350 advertising and public relations undergraduate students coming from three different universities. The results indicate that, like it happens in the “real” advertising industry, the creative department will be, predominantly, male. This suggests that the educational system could reproduce and legitimate the inequity between men and women in the advertising departments. In this way, if the enterprises adopt this measure of corporate social responsibility, the university education must adequate the teaching of advertising’s systems and process to the new parameters imposed by the advertising social responsible enterprise