Kevin Roberts, the top ad agency boss suspended from his job as chairman of Saatchi earlier this week for failing to show sufficient enthusiasm for promoting “gender equality” has now quit and apologised.
This was totally the wrong move (as I’ll explain in a moment) but I totally get why he chose to jump.
Which remotely self-respecting achiever would wish to prostitute his talents at a company which valued political correctness more highly than the bottom line?
Which alpha male could endure having to answer to blow-dried ponces like Maurice Levy, the smoothy-chops, silver fox French surrender monkey from Publicis Groupe who cravenly threw Roberts to the wolves rather than standing by his talent?
Which reasonable human being could possibly stomach having to work in a business so pullulating with grisly feminist harridans and emasculated Social Justice Warriors that merely telling the truth about the very obvious differences between men and women has become a sackable offence?
Just to recap, let’s remind ourselves what Kevin Roberts did to get himself into trouble.
At the weekend, he was invited by Business Insider to agree that there was a gender diversity problem within the advertising industry.
It cited the following evidence:
All of the six major advertising agency holding company CEOs are men. A survey conducted by The 3% Conference in 2014 found women make up 46.4% of the advertising industry, yet only 11.5% of creative directors within ad agencies are female.
But Roberts refused to play the game.
Women, he argued, mostly don’t want the top jobs men covet not because there’s a glass ceiling or because there’s institutional sexism but simply because women tend to have different priorities.
Roberts – clearly a forthright character who doesn’t believe in career-safe platitudes – said:
“So we are trying to impose our antiquated shit on them, and they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem. I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”
What’s obvious from that statement is that Roberts is bending over backwards not to sound chauvinistic. He isn’t celebrating male machismo, aggression and overweening ambition: rather he is claiming to be embarrassed by it. Hence the phrases “antiquated shit” and “idiotic dinosaur-like men.” Women, he is suggesting, are actually a lot more sensible and better balanced than men.
But still, it isn’t enough to let him off the hook.
Using tactics straight out of the SJW playbook, the (female) journalist relays Roberts’s unexceptionable observation to a feminist campaigner called Cindy Gallop, whose speciality appears to be whining on social media about sexism in the workplace.
“I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business,” declares her Twitter profile.
Gallop – refusing to accept the outrageous calumny that not all the female species want to behave like blokeish thugs and blow stuff up – provides the requisite rent-a-quote.
“The best response to that is to throw it open to the industry, and ask the women and men of the ad industry, all around the world, to tweet at @krconnect to let him know whether they think I’m ‘making it all up’.”
If you’ve read Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie you’ll know this is a classic technique of the regressive left.
Read the rest at Breitbart.