The Female Futures Fund Shortlist Revealed by IAPI

The Female Futures Fund is a unique opportunity for high potential females with the advertising, media and communications industry to win an executive coaching bursary worth €10,000 in total. IAPI are able to provide this with the generous support of its bursary sponsor Diageo.

“The bursary is a real landmark in our journey to improving the gender balance. Our industry has started to address this at leadership level with 38% of executive roles now taken by females, according to the 2019 IAPI Census Report. Coaching is so empowering for women, particularly those in male dominated roles, where confidence seems to be the key barrier to their career progression." said Charley Stoney, CEO of IAPI.

Stoney continued: "This bursary is aimed at identifying women with huge potential in the advertising industry. However, we do not simply wish to award the already high achievers, we would like to recognise those who simply may not know how good they are yet and are therefore unwittingly holding themselves back from achieving their career goals. The ideal is to find two women who truly need to be given the extra boost of confidence to excel and so would benefit the most from this bursary worth €5,000 to each winner.”

IAPI received 26 nomination forms and the high calibre of all the candidates was evident. The judging panel included Jill Walker, executive coach; Charley Stoney, CEO of IAPI; Charlotte Barker, IAPI board member and chair of diversity and inclusion council; Grainne Wafer, global brand director,

Diageo; and Mark Doyle, CMO at AIB. Gráinne Wafer is also joint lead of Diageo’s progressive gender portrayal programme globally and is the Diageo representative for the UN stereotype Alliance, a UN and industry wide platform which seeks to eradicate harmful gender-based stereotypes in advertising.

The six shortlisted candidates will present remotely via video call to the judges next week with the winners being announced on Thursday 30th April. The two selected candidates will be able to avail of the Female Futures Fund. The bursary will fund 6 coaching sessions for each candidate with Jill

Walker between June and December 2020.