Rachel Bristow ( Sky Media) in Women’s Month Comments: I think we are gaining momentum and making progress on gender equality, but there is still work to be done on both sides

As March is a month when women are celebrated, AdHugger asked a few professionals with a remarkable career to tell us their views on developing their career as women working in the communication industry and what were the challenges. And Rachel Bristow, Director of Client Partnerships at Sky Media, offered us her view over the matter.

As an industry, I think we are gaining momentum and making progress on gender equality, but there is still work to be done on both sides. It’s important that men are actively involved in addressing gender diversity. Organisations should help men have a good work-life balance through initiatives such as flexible working and shared parental/supportive paternity leave. These initiatives should be on a par with those offered to women to evolve the workplace in a broader sense.

From a personal perspective, although I don’t feel like I’ve faced any gender related obstacles, I did experience harassment earlier in my career. A supportive HR Manager helped me to deal with the situation, but the experience highlighted the importance of acting upon such issues.

As a woman in a leadership role, I put my success down to being willing to lead on projects where the answer isn’t always clear and help colleagues through difficult periods. These times have been my steepest learning curves helping me to increase my resilience.

I believe we need to get to a point where gender diversity is not thought about in all businesses, and the balance is 50:50. We need to continue working towards a world where diversity in all forms is embedded into both a company and its employees’ behaviour.’

Rachel Bristow was appointed as Director of Client Partnerships at Sky Media in 2014 to develop a market-leading focus on partnerships with advertisers and agencies to achieve growth, driven by a combination of excellent content, in-depth understanding of its customers and exclusive access to data and proprietary technology products. Prior to her role at Sky Media, Rachel was VP, Global Media Data & Analytics at Unilever, where she was responsible for establishing the first global data management platform and introducing the global media data visualisation platform. Since joining Sky Media, Rachel has re-focused its client strategy, placing emphasis on creating business partnerships that deliver added value for both parties and formed a specialist partnership division.