The Fair Treatment · Australian advertising-industry initiative · September 2026
Advertising has spent years discussing why women directors receive fewer opportunities. The Fair Treatment is trying something more useful.
It removes names, production companies and identifying information from director treatments, then waits to see whether changing what decision-makers know changes whom they choose.
The Challenge
Women represent 22.39% of directors on the rosters of major Australian production companies, but directed only 14.8% of the commercial work featured in industry trade coverage between 2019 and July 2026.
Is the problem simply availability, or what happens when the work is awarded?
The Strategy
Stop asking people whether they are biased. Change the conditions under which they make the decision.
The Fair Treatment keeps most of the familiar bidding process intact. Agencies still choose directors whose work they trust. But once agencies brief those directors, their identities disappear.
The experiment can then compare what happens when treatments are judged without the names, genders, reputations and production-company associations that usually accompany them.
The Execution
Participating agencies select three directors to pitch, at least one of whom must be a woman.
From that point, questions and answers are handled through anonymised documents. Treatments contain no names, production companies, recognisable house styles or other identifying signals. Agency producers act as a firewall, handling budgets and logistics without revealing who submitted what.
The preferred treatment is chosen before the director’s identity is disclosed. Results from participating bids will be analysed and published in early 2027, so the experiment has not yet proved that blind selection changes outcomes.
Campaigns That Used Similar Tactics
Smash Stereotypes → Expose the Bias: Instead of telling decision-makers they are biased, the initiative creates a controlled situation in which any change in their choices can help reveal whether identity was influencing the judgement.
The Social Swap · Heineken · Edelman and LePub · 2023
Role Reversal Protagonist → The Blind Bias Test: Remove or disguise the identity attached to the work, let people judge it, then reveal who was behind it and examine what changed.
WoMen’s Football · Orange · Marcel · 2023
Orange showed football fans a compilation apparently featuring stars from the French men’s team. After viewers had admired the skill, the film revealed that the footage belonged to the women’s team, with male faces added through visual effects. The audience had already valued the performance before discovering who had produced it.
The Question That Could Get You There
How could we make the bias reveal itself?
