Ladies,Wine&DesignHamburg#10:"NewTech"Meet-UpinOurWorkshopHall

"Ladies, Wine & Design" was founded by Jessica Walsh to promote exchange among women in the creative industry. Jessica - Creative Director and Partner at Sagmeister & Walsh in New York - has engaged extensively with successful women (she is one herself) and often faced more or less sexist accusations. She had to deal with claims that she "is only successful because she slept with her business partner" or that she only got so far "because she is young and pretty." Bullshit: The fact that her success is obviously due to a lot of talent and hard work is completely overlooked. Sexism in the creative industry (even among women) unfortunately occurs not infrequently. In times of #metoo, it is all the more important to address this and, above all, to talk about it together.

Let's look at the number of women in the position of a (Creative) Director: Statistically, only 3% occupy the creative executive chairs, 5% of women hold the position of CEO. LW&D aims to change this through conversations and creative meet-ups, transforming existing competitiveness into mutual support. The initiative now exists in more than 200 locations, Hamburg being one of them. Led by Anissa and Karolin, events on various topics have been held for a year. Thanks to our Hannah, we had the honor of hosting issue #10 in our Hamburg workshop. Alongside her were three other powerhouse women who shared and discussed their experiences as women in the tech and advertising industry with about 40 (female) guests. A small side note: The tickets for the event sold out within a minute, and the waiting list was long.

The Panel

The evening began with a panel discussion between Liane, Creative Strategy/DACH Lead at Snapchat (a new mother, briefly forgot she was married), Toni, Lead Designer at myTaxi (actually Antonia, but always thinks she's done something wrong when addressed by her full name), Nora, Designer at IBM iX (new to Hamburg), and not to forget our Hannah, Experience Director at Demodern and host of the panel (with us for six months). All four share a more or less long history in the advertising and digital industry, having made their own experiences with sexism, diversity, and success or pressure to succeed at work. Whether it's seemingly sexist tweets that were deleted, diversity training that every employee must attend, or having to "conform to the system" - following the motto: "if I play the game, nothing will happen to me. But it's better if you don't wear lipstick or short skirts, sweetie..."

But a lot is changing - especially outside of traditional advertising agencies, strong structural changes are already noticeable: hierarchies are becoming flatter, work is done more at eye level and independently, and efforts are made to make work as pleasant as possible for both female and male employees. CEOs largely give teams and employees free rein, women AND men with children are seamlessly integrated or reintegrated after parental leave, home office and flexible hours are no problem - the main thing, of course, is that you do your work appropriately and convincingly. But with so much trust, that should actually be guaranteed.

Questions & Answers

The Q&A session then focused on personal experiences with sexism (both in the audience and among the four panel participants) and how companies and agencies deal with it. Everyone agreed: A healthy mix of men AND women is important - collaboration should fundamentally be at eye level, full of mutual respect and honesty. The overarching theme was "New Tech" and was, of course, not overlooked: Therefore, more or less future technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Smart Cities, like the already existing city of Songdo in South Korea, were discussed, and an outlook was given on what to expect in the future.

Testing

Speaking of New Tech: Our devices and installations were also duly appreciated. As soon as Hannah announced it, our visitors couldn't be stopped and tried out our gadgets. The whole thing was an absolute self-runner, and so there was swinging in VR, the IKEA apartment - also in Virtual Reality - was set up, or the new Smart configured. (and no, pink was not the color of the evening...) #metoo

The highlight was our interactive Kinect installation for Lufthansa - gymnastics exercises with Jerome Boateng and Thomas Müller were THE thing. So it wasn't entirely without men after all. #metoo (again)

How we found the evening...