UK: JWT sex discrimination case: why two ousted male creatives won

Article here. Excerpt:

'Campaign first broke the news of the legal case in November 2018 when it was alleged Bayfield, Jenner and three other colleagues had been made redundant after they raised concerns about comments made by Jo Wallace, creative director of JWT, at a Creative Equals conference in May.

Wallace introduced herself as a gay woman and said she wanted to “obliterate” the reputation that the agency was full of white, privileged straight men after the company announced a gender pay gap of 44.7%.

She was speaking not long after the publication of the first mandatory reports by UK companies on gender pay gaps and they revealed that JWT UK had the biggest gap in advertising.

Bayfield and Jenner expressed concerns about the safety of their jobs, with Bayfield sending an internal email stating: “I found out recently JWT did a talk off site where it vowed to obliterate white middle-class straight people from its creative department. There are a lot of very worried people down here.”

The five men were among those who lost their jobs later that year in a redundancy process – at a time when JWT and its parent company, WPP, were under-performing.

“The gender pay gap was mortifying for the company – because it was an awful gap – and their approach was to go gung-ho on who they perceived to be the enemy,” Bayfield said. “They rigged up a kangaroo court and fired us.”'