As someone who has built a career as a photographer with a focus on gender equality and diversity in advertising and media, I recently had a chance to photograph a group of women who are leaders in these industries, marking the centenary year of WACL.

I was delighted to take part as it ties in with another project I am working on, to photograph the world’s female presidents and prime ministers, creating the largest contemporary collection of portraits of women in leadership.

It felt like a moment of syzygy: while capturing images of the most powerful women alive, I’d also meet some of those who influence society and culture thanks to their own leadership roles in advertising and media, and photograph them for Harper’s Bazaar.

I started finding out more about WACL, and learned that the organisation began as the Women’s Advertising Club of London all the way back in 1923 (it has since changed its name to Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership).

In some ways it’s exciting to think that, even before all adult British women were given the right to vote, there were enough employed in significant roles in the ad industry to warrant forming their own organisation – and that one of its earliest acts was to formally state its mission to “widen the range of advertising vision”

On the other hand, it was depressing to discover that, a hundred years on, WACL is still having to argue for gender parity – especially at a senior level.

I also researched the WACL members who were taking part in this shoot and was truly inspired to see the ways they are bringing about societal change. Collectively they’ve argued for better legal protections and improved working conditions for women, demanded more diversity in the voices that are amplified in British society, and achieved greater recognition of the immense cultural contributions made by women in this country.

And of course, they’re all hugely successful in their individual careers.

Among them are pioneering women who are well known in their respective industries, namely Nishma Patel Robb, WACL President and Google UK’s senior director marketing; Rania Robinson, CEO of Quiet Storm; Kate Waters, ITV’s director of client strategy and planning; Carol Reay, independent director at Quiet Storm and chair of NFM; and Jackie Stevenson, chief growth officer EMEA at IPG.

They are joined by patrons - high-profile names like Kate Mosse, the writer who founded the Women’s Prize for Fiction; Oti Mabuse, a broadcaster, championship-winning dancer, and the first Black professional to appear on Strictly Come Dancing; and Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, the barrister who authored the groundbreaking book Eve Was Framed, which lifts the lid on the systemic sexism of British justice.

But among all these accomplished women, and as I reflected on what WACL is trying to achieve, I noticed a glaring omission: there was no CEO of a major advertising group among us. This absence is not an oversight but rather it is indicative of a stark reality.

Studies have shown that there is a dearth of women CEOs in the advertising and communications industry, with WACL’s own research finding that just 30% of these roles are held by women. This is a shocking fact, and while it can be explained through myriad societal and structural factors, it is by no means something we can or should defend.

To spotlight this glaring omission and challenge the industry’s status quo, my creative partner, Marius Janciauskas, and I conceived an unconventional idea: to generate this missing woman using AI, placing her at the very heart of the Harper’s Bazaar shoot.

This AI endeavour serves as a stark representation of the current industry landscape, a placeholder for the women who should be in these roles. She’s the woman who was supposed to be on the shoot but wasn’t because of the gender imbalance in the industry. So we had to imagine how she might look.

Interestingly, a 2022 survey by the Reykjavik Index of Leadership showed that the media and entertainment sector was perceived to be most suitable for gender equality in leadership out of 23 industries they measured. Yet the same survey shows that only 48% of people across the G20 countries say they are very comfortable with having women as CEOs of major companies in general.

My hope is that our WACL photographic project inspires a change in people’s attitudes – but I am also aware that so much more could be done if the collective power of the advertising industry were harnessed to tackle this problem.

This is why WACL recently launched its 50% playbook – which outlines five key levers of change. The Playbook aims to chart a path to accelerate gender equality in our industry – and to increase representation of women at the very highest level in business: the CEO. 

So I am issuing a challenge to all of you: what will you do to change the minds of people around the world, so that women can take their rightful place in deciding how humanity will run itself?

The first place to start is to embrace WACL’s campaign to end the gender imbalance in the ad industry, so we no longer have to use AI to imagine what equality looks like.

Let this be a moment when human beings make AI obsolete, instead of the other way around. And please, more than anything, let WACL be campaigning for something else when it celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2123.