Community Conversations: Gender Bias in the Workplace

In 2020, AMA Triangle developed a little something we like to call, “The Whole Marketer Promise”. This promise is our commitment to always remembering that while we are marketers, we’re also children, parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors, and partners. We love marketing, but we also love cooking, dancing, biking, hiking, running, swimming, music, sports, traveling, and so much more. We’re a community of PEOPLE first and foremost, and right now, more than ever, we’re striving to be the community our members deserve, a place where each and every person in the Triangle has the opportunity to feel that they truly belong because AMA Triangle believes that marketing is for everyone.

To align with our inherent belief that marketing is for everyone, in June 2020, AMA Triangle teamed up with AMA Sacramento Valley and AMA New York to establish a national Taskforce to design an official DEI Pledge for all professional AMA chapters. The Pledge would be designed to help all 70 chapters nationwide establish and implement DEI practices within their organizations. To aid in our efforts, we grew our Taskforce to include AMA PDX, AMA New Jersey, and AMA Austin. Once the Pledge was complete, we realized we’d need to consistently provide DEI support for every chapter that signed, so we subsequently established monthly DEI Townhalls, DEI Collateral, digital campaign materials, calendars, and holiday guidance before officially launching on September 21, 2020.

When AMA Triangle says that we believe in DEI, we mean that we believe so deeply that we’ve dedicated ourselves to leading the charge for nationwide change. As marketers, we have the ability to influence what our communities, customers, and clients see, think, feel, and believe. As an industry, we believe that it is our greatest responsibility to ensure that the copy we’re creating, the images we’re posting, the language we’re using, and the ads we’re producing are, at their core inclusive and free of personal, professional, or cultural bias. We’ve committed not only to educate ourselves but to ensure that every single aspect of our operations start and end with DEI in mind. That every volunteer is committed to upholding the principles of DEI, and that each team is held to their own internal DEI KPIs. We’ve dedicated ourselves to DEI not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because we’re striving to be the community you deserve, and we see a better, brighter, and more inclusive future for our industry.