MAKERS 2020 Pledges

Ad Council — Lisa Sherman, President & CEO

The Ad Council pledges to maintain at least 50% women on the Ad Council Board of Directors and to achieve at least 20% people of color on our board by 2021. We continue to commit to using Free The Work to increase the number of women and other underrepresented creators in the production of Ad Council content.

Adobe — Katie Juran, Senior Director, Diversity & Inclusion

Two years ago at MAKERS, we pledged to achieve global gender pay parity — and we did it. Last year, we built on that success by pledging to launch an opportunity parity initiative examining fairness in promotions and horizontal movement. For our fiscal 2019, our global promotion rates for women and men were within 0.2 percent — with women higher. This year, we pledge to extend that promotions analysis to our organizations and major geographic regions as well as develop our first findings on horizontal movement.

Athleta — Sheila Shekar Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer

Last year, we pledged to unleash women’s and girls’ confidence and their limitless potential by harnessing our physical and digital platforms to create access to transformative holistic wellness experiences that reach millions across the country. Our Wellness Collective events and content in partnership with Well + Good brought actionable insight from 50+ female thought leaders across four pillars of wellness (Mind/Body, Community, Finance/Career, and Self Care) to hundreds of women in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and millions more through digital content across both our own and Well + Good’s vehicles. We heard from women loud and clear how much they value their connections with one another and need to care for their whole selves. Last year also brought the creation of our partnership with Allyson Felix, where we came together to empower women and girls. This year, together with Allyson, we will bring The Power of She to life in a new, invigorated platform – and while I can’t share too much quite yet – we will reinforce the power of an inclusive collective by launching a 360 degree, 365 days a year platform to bring together millions of women and girls to unleash their limitless potential.

BBDO — Kathryn Brown, Managing Director

For the past year we’ve been focused on better assessing the needs of new parents returning to the office including better furnishing our Mother’s Room and providing more information to employees around available services. In 2020, for those employees with more than one year of service we’ve pledged to double paid disability leave for new mothers, and triple paid parental leave for all new parents, regardless of gender.

Bloomberg & UBS — Deirdre Bigley, Global Chief Marketing Officer & Nicole Jenkins, Managing Director, Client Relationship Manager

Two years ago, right here at MAKERS, a group of women from UBS and Bloomberg put their heads together with an idea to change the face of finance – one girl at a time. From that moment, UBS and Bloomberg began a collaboration to bring girls from diverse backgrounds together to learn about the capital markets and to inspire the next-generation of female leaders.

In March 2019 we kicked off Girls Take Wall Street in New York by bringing 120 girls to discussions at UBS and Bloomberg and then to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to ring the closing bell. Late last year, we expanded to two locations in India. In 2020, we pledge to expand the "Girls Take" program to 13 major cities including New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. This collaboration born at MAKERS, serves as a model of how we can bring together like-minded institutions to create a better world for women and girls.

Cognizant — Meera Krishnamurthy, SVP and Strategic Business Unit Leader for Insurance

With a sharpened focus on accelerating gender diversity globally in our leadership pipeline, Cognizant pledges to put 1,000 high performing women in leadership levels though Propel, our signature women’s global leadership development initiative, by the end of 2021.

Engine — Kasha Cacy, Global CEO

Engine pledges to increase development opportunities and resources for high-potential women across our organization to ensure that we are developing a strong pipeline of females leaders for the future.

Google — Tara Levy, VP, Agency and Brand Solutions

Google pledges to increase global representation of women, and women of color through hiring, career development and progression, retention of talent and creating a culture of inclusion and belonging for everyone.

In 2019, our representation of women increased by 0.7 percentage points year over year, our hiring of women rose by 1.9 percentage points and women were less likely to leave Google than average. In 2020, we’re doubling down to keep moving the needle. We will scale women's leadership programs, conduct our annual pay equity analyses and adjustments and continue to share our workforce representation data publicly.

Facebook — Michelle Klein, VP, Global Business Marketing

My MAKERS pledge is to accelerate the elimination of bias in advertising. We will commit to this through equitable representation in front of the screen and behind it, and in fostering inclusive communities around the world.

Hanover Insurance Company — Cilsy Harris, VP, Corporate/Enterprise CIO

Listen. Advocate. Amplify. These will be the three core components of our 2020 pledge to raise awareness and educate our employees on the power of allyship and sponsorship. Through awareness and education we will learn a great deal about our fellow colleagues, identify opportunities to intensify the voices of others and show support through action.

Hilton — Laura Fuentes, SVP, Talent, Rewards and People Analytics

At Hilton, we are committed to being a great place to work for all, where women thrive at every stage of their experience with us. We pledge to achieve gender parity at our global leadership group level and board of directors by 2025.

IAB — Sheryl Goldstein, SVP of Marketing and Member Investment

As the largest trade organization serving the digital media landscape, we have an opportunity to educate, inform and lead our members in areas that will help them grow their business and develop their talent. We pledge to leverage the IAB platform to bring programs to our member base around D&I, women and leadership and skill building programs like building your brand and developing communications skills. I commit to having one of these programs each quarter with a goal of reaching 300+ people this year.

iHeartMedia — Gayle Troberman, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer

We will continue to give voice to the women of iHeart by literally handing the mic to women. Extending our successful (WIN) Women's Event Series into a podcast by the women of iHeart for the women of iHeart. Crowdsourced content with the biggest female names in audio getting into it with the most diverse and interesting thinkers across the company, on-demand for all to hear.

At iHeart we are all about giving voice to America. So, we pledge 2 things this year. First, we are going to turn the mic over to our female employees and expand our Women’s Initiative from an event series to a podcast by and for the women of iHeart. Secondly, as the #1 commercial podcast network, iHeart Podcast Network is going to commit 50 percent of our production to new shows and slates from diverse creators, women, women of color and more — because everyone needs to be heard. And we welcome support from the brands, creators and the powerful voices in this room to help us get there.

Kaiser Permanente — Ije-Enu N. Nwosu, Executive Director of Impact Spending

The diversity of Kaiser Permanente’s workforce reflects the rich diversity of its patients, members, and communities. Nearly 65 percent of the organization’s total workforce are members of racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities, and nearly 75 percent are women. In 2020, we are committed to driving equity and inclusion in the communities we serve. We pledge to increase our spend with women-owned businesses in our footprint and encourage the vendors in our supply chain to do the same.

Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP — Julie Fink, Managing Partner

We pledge to support and stand by women who continue to speak out and improve the workplace through advocacy.

Lesbians Who Tech — Leanne Pittsford, Founder and CEO

Lesbians Who Tech & Allies Summit will be 50% women of color attendees by 2021. We are currently 50% women of color speakers, specifically 30% black and latinx speakers and 10% trans and non-binary. We reach this representation by building trust in communities that are underrepresented, use opt-in diversity data to track the diversity of speakers through the application and speaker request process. We will replicate this for our attendees in 2021, so our attendees are as represented as our speakers.

Live Nation — Ali Harnell, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Women Nation

Women Nation was formed in the spring of 2019 with the express goal of supporting and advancing women in live entertainment through female driven and female led projects to amplify and empower women. Our pledge for 2020 is to work closely with women at Live Nation to support their growth as well as to build connective tissue throughout the entertainment industry to further women’s progress and change the representation.

lululemon — Celeste Burgoyne, EVP, Americas

At lululemon, we care for and invest in the whole person and mental health is a huge component of that. In 2020, we are committing to enhancing our mental well-being benefits to create an inclusive offering that will lead the way. We will provide training to all people managers so they are equipped to encourage conversations around mental well-being and recognize the signs when someone may need support.

Mailchimp — Shareka Nelson, Global Diversity and Inclusion Head

In 2020, Mailchimp pledges to conduct an internal pay equity study with a commitment to rectify any clear like-for-like disparities that may be revealed, with a goal to develop and communicate an action plan in H2 2020, which will inform the 2021 compensation cycle.

Mattel — Lisa McKnight, SVP and Global Manager, Barbie - Mattel, Inc.

Through the Barbie Dream Gap Project in 2020, we pledge to raise more awareness and funds, commission research and impact the lives of 10,000 girls through global programming with like-minded organizations.

McKinsey & Co. — Kweilin Ellingrud, Senior Partner

In 2020, we will continue focusing on recruiting and how we can use it to increase the diversity of our firm and ensure it is a highly inclusive process. Specifically, we are dedicated to looking for talent in different ways, including diversifying schools where we actively recruit and expanding the skillsets and experience profiles of the people we bring into the firm. This includes expanding our efforts to hire senior tenure women.

OAAA — Anna Bager, President and CEO

In 2020, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America is committed to changing the hearts and minds of our 900+ member companies, represented by nearly 9,000 media professionals, by eliminating unconscious gender bias especially when it comes to hiring and promoting women. We will ensure gender equivalency is a central topic at all industry functions and gatherings with the goal to advance diversity and inclusion within all the companies that comprise the out of home community.

Ogilvy — Lauren Crampsie, Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer

In the US, we are committed to moving the needle in two key areas: parental leave and gender equality. First, we commit to updating our parental leave policy to make it more competitive with the current landscape. Second, while we have made strides in gender equality, we are #notdone, and commit to ensuring that 50% of our senior level hires are women.

Oracle Data Cloud — Michelle Hulst, GVP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

Oracle Data Cloud wants to be a part of the solution in closing the data gender gap, and I am making a pledge today to help us do it. Our Moat and contextual intelligence products already analyze and measure billions of web pages, apps, and other digital media for their content, so we can help advertisers place their ads in brand safe and brand suitable environments.

Going forward, we are going to extend those solutions to incorporate measurement of representation of women and people of color. By doing so, not only we will be able to better understand representation in content, but how much of it is safe, accurate, and bias-free.

This information will allow advertisers to make real-world decisions to allocate their investments to content that reinforces the positive and accurate representation of women and people of color in media.

Participant Media — Holly Gordon, Chief Impact Officer

Participant is one of the producers of the new film Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, about Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI is committed to ending mass incarceration in the US and challenging racial and economic injustice. A new era of truth and justice starts with confronting our history of racism. Participant pledges to take the entire company to Montgomery, Alabama, to experience the Legacy Museum, which explains the evolution of slavery to our current mass incarceration crisis, and the Memorial for Peace and Justice, which marks the period of racial terror in this country when 4,400 African Americans were lynched. We hope others will make it part of official diversity and inclusion efforts as well.

P&G — Allison Tummon, Gender Equality Global Program Leader

At P&G, we aspire to a world free from gender bias with equal voice and equal representation for all individuals. We will keep leveraging our voice in advertising and media to spark conversations that change minds and work together to remove barriers to girls education and women’s economic opportunities. We’re committed to equal representation at all levels of our company and already are 50/50 at more junior levels, and over 40% for our company officers and Board of Directors with women in key leadership roles. But we too are NOT DONE. In the year ahead we will challenge the myths and false narratives that still hold women back and create an equal and inclusive workplace with equality-minded leaders - both inside P&G, and, in partnership with many of the organizations represented here on the MAKERS@ Board today, also outside P&G, in our industry and workplaces around the world so we can close the gender gap and have everyone contribute to their full potential.

PayPal — Cassandra Knight, VP, Chief Litigation Counsel

In order to build and leverage a strong pipeline of diverse leaders, PayPal will continue to focus efforts in driving deeper engagement, retention, and an intentional accelerated path towards leadership roles at PayPal for women and ethnically diverse top talent.

Pivotal Ventures — Catherine St-Laurent, Director, Brand & Special Initiatives

We’ve had an incredible year at Pivotal Ventures with a major new commitment by our founder, Melinda Gates, of $1 billion over the next decade to individuals, ideas and organizations that will accelerate women’s power and influence in the United States. We also have a dedicated and creative team of strategists and investors who are overwhelmingly women. For us, our immediate goal is to ensure we’re sourcing ideas, innovations and talent from networks outside of our own immediate ones. We want to deeply learn from and engage with more people of color, those with lived experience and those who experience multiple barriers — in addition to gender — to reaching their own power and influence. Our pledge in 2020 is to increase our support to more diverse and emerging founders of organizations and for Pivotal to be welcoming and inclusive of all people, creating an environment in which everyone can contribute their talents, skills and wisdom to advance our shared mission as an organization.

Prophet — Chiaki Nishino, Senior Partner, Head of North America Region

In 2019, Prophet launched two different sponsorship programs in order to establish gender parity. Junior partner levels are close to 50/50 women/men, although there’s progress to be made for more senior positions. For 2020, we’re doubling down on advancing and accelerating the number of women in leadership positions. We will do this by continuing to drive more inclusive behaviors, practices and sponsorship as well as by having at least 50 percent of candidates be women for both external hires and for internal leadership positions. Additionally, we will make Prophet a career destination of choice for parents by easing the process for coming back after parental leave and enhancing our leave policies. We will hold ourselves accountable by having quarterly readouts of metrics to our firm, ExCo and our Board.

R/GA — Nicky Bell, SVP and Managing Director

At R/GA we have exceeded our 2019 goal of increasing retention of women of color by 15% year on year and established gender pay equity across our network. For 2020, R/GA pledges to increase retention of women of color 25% year on year by creating a more inclusive environment that embraces real conversations about race and continues to prioritize career development and mentorship.

Rich Talent Group — Jana Rich, Founder and CEO

Rich Talent Group was founded on the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Every member of our team is a woman, person of color, or LGBTQ. As an executive recruiting firm, we pledge that 75% of the candidates we put in front of our clients will add diversity to the leadership team in consideration, and 90% at the board level.

Sleep Number — Alixandra Colehour, VP, Organizational Effectiveness

At Sleep Number, we plan to advance on our diversity, equity and inclusion success through initiatives including: conscious inclusion training for every leader at Sleep Number; achieving gender balance in our stores by 2025; launched a wellbeing and self-identification survey to truly know how our team members identify allowing for intersectionality analysis and added an inclusion and belonging index to our engagement survey, tied to sales performance; provide all managers with a toolkit to assess their teams’ belonging index and tips on how to lead in inclusive ways.

Stitch Fix — Suzy Sammons, Global VP, Communications

In 2019 we introduced Universal Parental leave for employees at Stitch Fix. In many modern families, parents view each other as equals when it comes to caregiving and careers, and companies need to do the same. This year, we will make it easier for all eligible employees to take their leave, creating the support networks that make it possible and helping parents come back to work in a way that's effective, reasonable and helps our employees balance all their roles in life. With greater understanding of what this group needs we can foster an environment of trust and empathy that we can extend over time, as we look at the needs of other employees within Stitch Fix.

The Female Quotient — Shelley Zalis, CEO and Founder

We pledge to help unite the world through the power of women. We are rewriting the rules in the workplace so that everyone can thrive. We are also creating company cultures with conscious leadership so that we can close the gaps...sooner than 257 years!

Warner Media — Katrina Cukaj, EVP, CNN Advertising Sales

WarnerMedia pledges to increase our representation of women and people of color in leadership roles behind the scenes. We will interview diverse/inclusive slates for every open VP position. We also remain committed to our production diversity policy: WarnerMedia pledges to use our best efforts to ensure that diverse actors and crew members are considered for film, television and other projects, and to work with directors and producers who also seek to promote greater diversity and inclusion in our industry. To that end, in the early stages of the production process, we will engage with our writers, producers and directors to create a plan for implementing this commitment to diversity and inclusion on our projects, with the goal of providing opportunities for individuals from under-represented groups at all levels. And, we will issue an annual report on our progress.

Weight Watchers — Gail Tifford, Chief Brand Officer

As the Chief Brand Officer of WW, and as a longtime advocate for the realistic representation of women and girls in media and advertising, I pledge to ensure the accurate portrayal of women in all of our marketing and communication which has impact around the world.

UMWW — Lynn Lewis, U.S. CEO

Increase senior level representation (VP, SVP and EVP) of women of color (AA) by 50 percent; conduct bias training 2.0 for 50 percent of the employee population; and increase senior level representation (VP, SVP and EVP) of women of color by 25 percent.

Verizon — Christy Pambianchi, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer

Moving the world forward takes more than the best technology. It takes the best people. Verizon is committed to attracting diverse talent, developing them to their full potential, and inspiring them to build a career with us. Today, women and people of color represent approximately 60% percent of our workforce and over 50% at our top level of management and Board. But we are not done! We pledge to build an even stronger pipeline of women and people of color by strengthening sourcing, development and retention initiatives from entry level to executive leadership.

Visa — Julie Rottenberg, Deputy GC, Chief Counsel, North America, Risk and Merchant Solutions

We pledge to bring visibility, global recognition and mentorship to women founded and run startups through Visa Everywhere Initiative, the Visa early-stage open innovation program designed to tap into FinTech and Capability building to solve business challenges touching over 100 Countries around the world

Zambezi — Jean Freeman, Principal and CEO

Women are starting businesses at historic rates. While the rates are encouraging, the access that women have to resources to grow their businesses is limited. 90% of women-owned businesses currently do not have revenues over $100,000. My pledge is to be a resource/advocate/coach to 10 women-owned businesses this year who want to grow their companies to over $1 million.

Zenith Media — Linda Fitzsimmons, President, Client Leadership

In addition to continuing to support our 2019 pledge for gender equality in our leadership – ensuring there is a definitive 50/50 split for Vice President level and above – Zenith pledges to make mentoring a priority. We will start with a ‘mini MAKERS’ event to bring the conference experience back to our agency – women and men alike. We will also create a formal mentorship program to create meaningful connections, to share best practices and to offer support, among our established leadership, emerging leaders and those starting out in their careers.