Our publisher, Andy Oakes, posted his column in the NDA newsletter and on social media last week, and it got a huge reaction. We thought we should post it here too.
Walk into many agency or adtech offices today, and you’ll notice something has changed. The women over 45 who used to run the room are missing. Not fired in a headline-grabbing round of layoffs, just quietly not renewed, not backfilled, not called back after maternity leave, not considered for the “next chapter” role they were promised. They didn’t leave the industry. The industry stopped inviting them in.
I first noticed this when I offered three free tickets to job seekers to our Digital Women lunch back in March. I was inundated with emails, and we sadly ended up with far more applications than I could handle.
And these weren’t junior staffers. These were women who built the basics of the UK adtech scene, many of whom sat through the birth of programmatic, who explained cookies to boardrooms before cookies were a policy issue, who mentored half the mid-level talent now running departments without them. Their disappearance is harder to see than a mass layoff because it happens one contract, one restructure, one “culture fit” conversation at a time.
A friend of mine is 48 with two decades in adtech, the kind of person who once explained cookie sync to a room of confused CMOs, and has had to spend this summer updating a CV she hadn’t touched since 2011. Her contract simply wasn’t renewed. No restructure announcement, no severance drama. Just a calendar invite that never came, and a Slack channel she quietly lost access to.
Ask why, and the reasons offered are vague: budgets, “energy,” a preference for candidates who are “closer to the platforms.” None of that survives scrutiny. What’s actually happening is a quiet recalibration of who gets to look expensive, senior, and permanent on a P&L in an industry addicted to youth as a proxy for cheapness and adaptability.
The cost is not just personal, although it’s a massive blow and I’ve seen it with some of my close friends in the industry. It’s the confidence hit, the mortgage anxiety, the childcare costs that suddenly look much steeper.
It’s also a structural loss because she’s the person who remembers why the last platform migration went sideways, who knows which client actually reads the fine print, who’s mentored half the department now interviewing her for a role in a department she could easily run.
We can all be vocal about issues like the gender pay gap, like the issues women face at trade shows, like the fact the manel refuses to go away. It’s harder to be vocal about an issue that the industry doesn’t want to talk about.
If adtech wants to talk seriously about trust, transparency, and rebuilding a battered reputation, it might start by asking where its most experienced women went and why getting back in has become so much harder than getting pushed out.
