An organization aiming to improve the position of women in business says a new measurement metric can do the same for women in advertising.
In October, XR Extreme Reach partnered with The Female Quotient to launch a new measure called RX, or Representation Index, aiming to improve how inclusivity is measured in media.
“If you can’t see what you’re doing wrong, you can’t fix it,” said Shelley Zalis, CEO of The Female Quotient, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Influencing Creative Strategies and Accountability
The RX score measures five dimensions of inclusivity, including gender representation, accessibility, authority, age, skin tone, and body image. The new metric is an evolution of the gender equality measure (GEM) brought by #SeeHer, which focuses on how girls and women are portrayed in media.
“If you can’t see what you’re doing wrong, you can’t fix it,” Zalis said. “This just, right in front of your face, gives you such a simple tool to see where you are and where you can go.
“What this scoring does now is allow marketers, brands, content creators to be conscious of the work that they’re creating, and then they can fix it.
The Female Quotient is an organization engaged in advancing gender equality in the workplace. It offers services such as diversity and inclusion consulting, as well as leadership workshops, aimed at fostering equitable practices in media and marketing organizations.
Additionally, it provides measurement tools and signature experiences to facilitate discussions around equality.
Zalis has high hopes for the impact of the RX score on the industry. She believes it will unify and create a uniform measure across categories and content, making it the next best way to create change.
The Importance of Human Touch
But the new score has already put a baseline underneath the problem.
In December, XR published a first ever annual Global Advertising Representation Report, measuring inclusivity in more than one million ads across over 100 countries.
- It revealed an average representation score of 32 out of 100 worldwide.
- The score peaked as high as 42 for charity/non-profit and as low as 28 for sports.
- The report, backed by the RX, also looked at prevalence of skin tones and body types.
For Zalis, the data needs to be worked on in a very human way.
“We will never lose the importance of human touch, which is still the advanced thinking and how we then share the information and how we ensure that all people see themselves in the media that we’re pushing out, and that it’s a reflection of everyone, and that everyone feels comfortable,” Zalis said.
You’re watching “The Future of Representation: Technology Meets Humanity in Advertising”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2025, presented by XR Extreme Reach. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can view all of our CES 2025 content here.
