March is one of my favorite months because it’s Women’s History Month. And women are making plenty of the latter lately. Like so many of us, I have experienced goose bumps at seeing Kamala Harris become the first woman vice president ever. She’s also the first black woman, the first Asian-American woman and the first second-generation immigrant to hold that position, Vice President Harris inspires women and girls across the world to see the power of their own possibilities. She’s not alone.
Congrats also to Chloe Zhao, the second female director and first Asian woman to win a Golden Globe, and to Roz Brewer joining Walgreens and becoming the third African-American female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
These extraordinary leaders are the very idea of SeeHer coming to life before our eyes. If you can see her, you can be her. But as we know, the effects of a crisis are never gender neutral, and the pandemic is no exception. So for all of the momentum we’ve seen, women are still bearing the brunt of the economic and social fallout of Covid 19. And I really do worry that we’re facing a critical moment in our movement.
How do we meet that moment? I look to the leadership that is all around me that I see in our founders, our SeeHer team and in all of you, our members. Our founders had the foresight to recognize the role that media and marketing could play in the gender equality crisis. And our SeeHer team has put together an extraordinary playbook of tools to help us make a real difference.
I’m now about six months into my new role at Goldman Sachs and this is what we’ve been doing in 2020 and will continue to do through 2021. First, we’ve embedded GEM®, the industry standard for measuring gender bias in ads, into our marketing analytics dashboard. It is a core KPI for our marketers. Second, we’re using the SeeHer Marketing Essentials Toolkit as our blueprint.
We’re new to SeeHer, but we’re getting started with master classes on how to get our advertising right. We’re learning from the trends and insights you can get from GEM®. We’ve got ambassadors who sit on my team and we’re identifying ambassadors across the firm. We’re going to cascade the marketing toolkit so we can integrate SeeHer into every marketing team.
And personally, I’m recruiting a new marketing team to add to the team I’ve got and I’ve really doubled down on insuring an equitable process. You have to take personal responsibility, send the recruiters back again and again to find equal slates of candidates.
So that’s what we’re doing to maintain momentum. I know all of you are taking similar steps to ensure that what we have gained is not lost and to harness our collective power to keep moving forward.
