Girl Guides: D&AD president Laura Jordan Bambach on supporting women in the industry

But it hasn’t been easy. Bambach says she has encountered a general undertone of sexism throughout her career and her experiences led her to create SheSays in 2007, an organisation designed to “educate, promote and inspire” women to take up digital creative careers.

“It is very, very hard as a woman to get the respect of senior people in the industry,” she says, “and so you just have to really slog at it.”

“A couple of times I’ve had something more overt, where someone has suggested I’m ‘being emotional’ when I have a strong opinion, when actually I’m just passionate about a piece of work.” Bambach says that on another occasion when she was on her way to a business trip for Johnson & Johnson in Sydney when a colleague asked her, in surprise, if she was planning to take her son along to Australia for the trip.

She says: “I thought, why would I take my son all the way to Australia to go to a business meeting? Would you ask a guy if he was taking his kids along? There are a lot of weird things like that, they’re not always really in your face, but people say some strange things.”

Bambach’s career began in 1994 when she started working on ‘cyberfeminist’ magazine Geekgirl and she describes the magazine’s founder, Rosie Cross, as a “complete inspiration”.

She went on to spend two years at Terraplanet in 1997, and had stints at Deepend, Lateral and ID Media up until 2004. She became head of art at Glue London in 2005 and moved on to LBi in 2008, where she ultimately became executive creative director. She left in 2012 for a creative director at board level role at Dare, and continues to work with SheSays, which she set up with a friend after noticing a lack of female CVs coming through to agencies.

“We wanted to do something about it, so we first approached Wackwall and then the IAB and IPA to try and create some kind of event but nobody was really interested, so we decided to do it ourselves. “At our first event about 35 women attended and we realised how powerful it was to have the opportunity to meet other women in the industry, so we decided to carry on and it all started very organically like that.”

Bambach says the main purpose of the organisation is to provide a support network tailored for women, enabling them to strengthen their careers and provide a starting point for women coming into the industry.

“Whether it be strategy or looking at trends or how to get yourself unstuck creatively, or things that women maybe don’t like to ask in a work situation or in front of men, our events covered that. We were providing a safe space for women to come and ask questions and to network and meet other women and it’s just grown.”

SheSays now runs a mentoring scheme and an annual awards programme called the Golden Stilettoes, which she says celebrates the female members of creative teams often overlooked when their male colleagues take the glory at Cannes or D&AD. And speaking of the D&AD, which she describes as an “amazing organisation”, Bambach became its president in September after serving for a year as vice-president.

During her time in the position she hopes to give the organisation a refresh. “My focus is to really try to find D&AD’s voice,” she explains. “And actually we are working with Wieden + Kennedy at the moment – they are our new agency to help articulate that. “D&AD sometimes gets slated for being old fashioned or for only caring about advertising, but it is as dynamic as its members and we are trying to find some ways of bringing members in a little bit more to the organisation.

It needs to have a shift and I want to make it open, friendly, young and interesting.” Bambach’s enthusiasm for the industry and the success she has achieved show that while she believes it is harder as a woman to climb the career ladder, it is possible to excel in digital as a female.

But until the landscape evens out, it will likely require an extra level of dedication. “You just have to be really determined and find a place that’s right for you,” she says.

“It’s almost like as a woman you can’t spend any time thinking about being a woman, because while you are considering all of that, the guys are just getting on and doing amazing work.

“There’s no doubt there are struggles in some areas of the creative department and technology has even fewer women. Certainly those areas need to change, but being creative is just generally hard. “You need to take a lot of rejection in order to do it and you need to have quite thick skin. You need to be OK with that and you have to be able to stand up for yourself.”