Millennials and the gender pay gap
OliverLuft 4th January 2017
Here’s a bit of uncheery news for the start of 2017 – despite years of progress, a woman in her 20s is still more likely to earn less today than a man of her own age.
Happy New Year, millennials!
We’ve written quite a bit about the points of difference between this generation and its predecessors in recent months. We’ve looked at its attitude to the working world and how work is changing to accommodate this generations’ ideas and expectations – but what we haven’t looked at, until now, is how gender determines your likely lifetime earnings.
The media industry is still too white.
Have you ever played Job Simulator? It’s a virtual reality game set in 2050. In the game, jobs are automated and players take part in comical approximations of what real-world jobs must have been like to do when humans, rather than robots, had to perform them.
Many people outside the commodities markets may not be aware of 
In a candidate-driven jobs market smart employers need to go the extra mile to secure the services of high-quality people. Often, the best person to fill a vacancy isn’t even looking to change roles, so what can a prospective new employer do to garner their interest?
Thanks to the increasing take-up of digital technologies and production cycles that ensure new content and information can be made available on an almost continuous basis, the media market is becoming ever more global – and with that comes a need for senior staff with the experience and drive to lead teams that are often dotted in offices across the globe.
Today marks eight years since MTA opened its doors to an eager media market. Although, as it turned out, the media market in 2008 was not that eager: within weeks, the global economic collapse had gathered pace and there was precious little investment in the industry. Timing has always been my strong point.
It used to be the case that most people would go to work, do their job, and never talk in detail to the outside world about what they were up to. That was for the bosses to worry about.
Brands, publishers and media owners are increasingly focused on tailoring content to meet the specific needs of individuals; and fuelling this rush to ever-greater personalisation has been a reliance on access to data – every last search term, web view, and geo-tagged movement helping firms to build a profile against which advertising can be sold.
It’s all too easy nowadays for marketing messages to be avoided. In such a super-saturated time it seems obvious to say this but, nevertheless, it’s true. Print advertising is growing less effective; ad-blocking software fights against pop-ups and intrusive Google Ads; and YouTube has provided us all with the ultimate get out – the ‘skip ad’ button.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, Mark Zuckerberg made an interesting comment about what he looks for when making important hires.
In his 2011 AdWeek memoir on David Ogilvy, the advertising legend, Kenneth Roman 
Every week I talk to dozens of media business leaders about how they recruit senior executives. I ask them what the changing nature of business means for their hiring policies, what their recruitment challenges and pain points tend to be, and I also ask about the measures they take when they’re recruiting executives – the advertising they use, the contingency agencies taken on, and the headhunters they engage.
Here’s a potentially concerning development all media owners would be advised to keep an eye on: this week, the Financial Times revealed ‘several’ mobile operators are proposing to lock advertising on their networks, with one European provider preparing to do so before the end of this year.
Off the top of your head can you guess where Britain’s fastest growing technology hub is located?
Online publishing businesses in the UK expect to be at the heart of a 2015 recruitment boom driven by the adoption of programmatic advertising systems, according to research released this month.