Working in a majority-female company is surprisingly similar to everywhere else I’ve worked. The ambition? Still here. The love of creativity and big, disruptive ideas? Still very much alive. The great atmosphere and strong social culture? Stronger than ever.

But there’s something missing.

The toxicity that too often gets conflated with ambition isn’t something you’ll find at Impero.

In my experience, very ambitious agencies tend to forget that their people are human beings who need to sleep, see their friends and family, and have some leisure from time to time.

But, it’s also my experience that agencies who are very good at remembering the above tend not to be very ambitious.

Few creative companies get this balance right, matching hunger, talent, and ambition with integrity, humility, and humanness.

The side effects of a 70% female workforce (with 100% pay parity)

If you’ve worked in advertising longer than a week, you’ve likely worked somewhere where “work-life balance” is a buzzword people pretend to care about but ignore, and those who do care are too scared to say anything.

It is in those places where ambition is measured not just in hours but in how many hours you’re at your desk. Where leaving a smidge early to pick up your children or to go somewhere to move your body is at best, tolerated and, at worst, career suicide.

I remember working on a pitch at one agency. I worked in the pub, and then at home until the ‘Milkman’s Hour’. But because I wasn’t at my desk, the ECD made the assumption I’d clocked off and sent me a shitty email.

When I returned to my desk early the following morning with a hefty armful of work, reading that email really stung.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen at Impero. Here, the default setting is; do your work, have fun, try not to be a dick, and don’t forget to be a human being.

Performance doesn’t equal sacrifice

In many corporate environments, ambition is so revered people wear burnout like a badge of honour.

Ours is a culture where ambition is not synonymous with exhaustion. Quite the contrary. The assumption is you’ll be better at your job because you have a life outside of work.

Beyond the long-standing ‘outputs need inputs’ school of thought, if you look at the research on creativity, particularly around it thriving when psychological safety is present, this stacks up.

Parenthood isn’t a penalty

In a lot of workplaces, the moment you have kids, you become a “problem to manage”, and that tax is far more severe for women.

It’s hard for most female professionals to do anything without raising eyebrows: arriving later after school drop off, leaving earlier for school pick up, logging off for dinner, bath time, and bedtime.

Women can’t win. They’re either a poor employee or a poor parent. Meanwhile, if a man does any of those things, he’s praised for “being a great Dad”.

At Impero, no one is checking the clock to make sure you’re suffering sufficiently for your payslip. And, there’s an understanding that if you log off for your kids, you’ll probably log back on later, if you need to.

Collaboration first, competition second

Competition has its place, particularly among creatives. You want it to be you making the work, not the other creatives. But the stories I hear of some companies sound like The Hunger Games.

At Impero, we lean more towards collaboration than one-upmanship. That doesn’t mean people aren’t ambitious. It just means success isn’t a zero-sum game.

That shift changes everything, and the studies back this up. Collaborative, gender-diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones. 

So are men just awful?

Unsurprisingly, no. Am I saying all male-dominated companies are toxic and all female-majority workplaces are utopias? No.

What I am saying is ‘culture’ is not what you say, no matter how much you’d like it to be.

Culture is shaped by who your workforce is, and that is also being represented at the top. When you get this right, it has real, tangible effects.

Nothing I’ve described should be unique to a female-majority company. Treating employees like human beings shouldn’t be a gendered concept. And yet, here we are, still calling it out because it’s the exception, not the rule.

Maybe it’s time to start asking why.