From the distaff side

When I was in high school, the advanced placement history program and debate team were led by a man who was generally regarded as the most brilliant teacher in any subject in the school. Freshmen tread warily past Mr. O'Connor's classroom for fear of disrupting one of his lectures. The truly daring signed up for his class in junior year. I was one of them. ▪ I suspect O'Connor would much rather have led intimate graduate seminars. But his discontent worked to the advantage of 15-year-olds looking for a challenge. We learned how to spar intellectually, following his example. We prepared for each class, or took the consequences: his verbal barbs were lethal. ▪ Although he was only in his 40s, O'Connor had an old-school style that included condescension for the young women in his audience. When one of us raised our hand to answer a question, he would observe with apparent surprise, “Ah, a comment from the distaff side….” In his class, I first met someone for whom the possession of an X chromosome required one to be twice as good to get half as far. But we got better than halfway. That spring, the majority of O'Connor's class — female and male — aced the AP exam. ▪ That was over 20 years ago, and my how little some things change. There are still highly creative, commercially successful men out there who, publicly or privately, think women in business are “crap.” At an ad industry conference held in Toronto in October, Neil French, WPP's worldwide creative director, described women in advertising in just those terms, further pronouncing them to be “wimps.” ▪ Around the same time French was in Toronto making his now-notorious remarks (which led to his resignation last month from WPP), PROMO's editorial team was reviewing its picks for the 2005 Marketers of the Year. We looked at dozens of people who had produced award-winning campaigns, leveraged technology in exciting new ways, acted as good corporate citizens and taken calculated risks. Gender wasn't a factor. And yet, for this year at least, slightly more than half of those on the final list are female. We judged on the basis of achievement — and these folks aced it. See what you think.