Why We Need Women to Be Creating More of the Fashion and Beauty Images We See

The words female empowerment are everywhere these days: news reports, panels, even commercials trying to sell you body wash or paper towels. (As a parody headline in The Onion put it, “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.”) And generally, Glamour is all about that message. After all, “one of the positive things that came out of the election this year is that it triggered a discussion about where we are in terms of gender and inequality,” says Barbara Risman, Ph.D., head of the department of sociology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “That social pressure—people coming together, making demands—is what helps push equality forward.”

But let’s talk about the end goal of empowerment: actual, you know, power. Spending power. Earning power. Political power. And in many of these areas, the stats are…dismaying. Consider: Women account for just 15 percent of the top executives in the United States and less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. We’re only 7 percent of pilots and flight engineers, and 20 percent of members of Congress. As our president-elect would say: Sad! “Our country needs all the talent we can get,” says Risman. “We have lots of challenging issues facing us, and women make up half of that brainpower. To not legitimize the power of women is to rob society of half its talent.”

At Glamour we agree. So we decided to look at our own backyard. How often were we using female contributors to create the images you see on our pages—and how could we do better? We tallied up every assignment we made in 2016, and the numbers were underwhelming: Just 37 percent of the photographers, 32 percent of the hairstylists, and 49 percent of the makeup artists we’d commissioned were women. To be fair, we hit it out of the park in other areas: 94 percent of our writers were female, as were 80 percent of stylists. Our peers in the magazine industry had roughly the same numbers we did, and fashion and beauty insiders say they’re not surprised. On one level, “women power the fashion and beauty industry,” says photographer Amanda de Cadenet. “We are the ones purchasing the product. Every ad and billboard is targeted to us. Yet the images that are being created are not being created by us. It’s kind of offensive!” There’s no comprehensive data, but experts agree women are underrepresented in the most prominent roles. “While the vast majority of photographers, hairdressers, makeup artists, and designers in the industry are women, at the very top it’s mostly men,” says historian Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. According to one study of top fashion labels, just 30 percent were designed or headed by women. And hair and makeup talent follows suit. “Even in makeup, which you’d think would have a higher percentage of women, it’s still very male on the creative side,” says Charlotte Tilbury, one of the world’s top makeup artists and the founder of Charlotte Tilbury cosmetics.