The Feminist Queries: Cindy Gallop

by Jen Nedeau

categories: Feminism, Media, Technology, The Feminist Queries

Published October 26, 2009 @ 09:45AM PT

For today's Feminist Query, I am featuring a woman I admire very much and have been lucky enough to spend a bit of time with here in New York City. Her name is Cindy Gallop. She is half English, half Chinese, grew up in Asia, in Brunei, and read English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford. She began working in theater marketing and then moved to advertising, where she spent the majority of her career working for one agency, global creative network Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH).

She joined BBH in London in 1989 to run global accounts such as Coca-Cola, Polaroid and Ray-Ban; moved to Singapore in 1996 to help start up and run BBH Asia Pacific; and finally, moved to New York in 1998 to start up BBH US. In 2003,  she was voted the "Advertising Woman of the Year" by Advertising Women of New York.

Four years ago, Cindy resigned as chairman of BBH to do something different. She now consults for clients who want to change the game in their particular sector, and who are looking for radical reinvention, as well as groundbreaking, innovative, forward-thinking strategic and executional approaches. She is the founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld.com, which is a simple crowdsourced web platform designed to turn good intentions into action and will launch in January 2010. She has also launched another side venture called MakeLoveNotPorn.com at TED 2009. In her "free time", Cindy acts as board adviser to a number of technology and media start-ups.

I hope you enjoy her responses as much as I did and think deeply about her question for you at the end.

Do you call yourself a feminist and if so why? When did you start identifying with the feminist movement?

I call myself a rampant feminist. I amplify that deliberately because I hate the way so many women shy away from the term 'feminist' as if it implied something negative along the lines of 'strident man-hating unfeminine harpy'. I am a self-described feminist because I believe in championing women's rights and women's issues, and doing everything I possibly can personally to help make the world a better and more advantageous place for women. Note I don't use the term 'equal' in there - we are so very, very far away from equality with men in so many respects that are not fully realized or acknowledged by either gender, that I find it hard to use that term casually.

To the second part of your question - I always have.

What were hurdles you faced as a woman in business? What is your advice for other women trying to make it to the top?

All the usual ones. My advice is, never give in to insecurity and lack of confidence - just grit your teeth and barrel through them. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.'

Many women struggle with the idea of self-promotion, but often it is the one way men get ahead in their career. Why should women embrace self-promotion and what will that mean for their careers?

It frequently astonishes me that people utter the world 'self-promotion' like it's a bad thing. Self-promotion is, very simply, about presenting your personal brand to the world in a way that achieves desired personal and professional outcomes. And it's like anything else - you can do it badly or you can do it well. When women do it well, it can make a significant difference to the way they're perceived and the way they progress in business - and in life, quite frankly. One of my personal mantras is, 'People value you at the value you are seen to put on yourself.' When you project a strong sense of confidence in who you are, that changes the way other people look at you and how they think about you - for the better.

You're working on two unique online projects - IfWeRanTheWorld.com and MakeLoveNotPorn.com. Can you briefly tell us about them both?

IfWeRanTheWorld is designed to bring human good intentions and corporate good intentions together and turn them into collective action.

MakeLoveNotPorn takes the myths of hard-core porn and balances them with the reality of how real people have real sex in the real world - just to help everyone have as good a time sexually as possible.

What both ventures have in common is that when I come across something I feel strongly about, I do something about it.

Finally, if you had one question to ask women everywhere, what would it be?

'What do you want your life to be?'

You decide - then go out and make it happen. Because nobody else is going to do it for you - but you absolutely can make it happen for yourself. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Alan Kay: "In order to predict the future, you have to invent it."