International Women's Day isn't a party. It's a protest. Don't accept the first answer, don't compromise on how things are going to be, if it feels wrong it probably is. Join Helen as she lays out the world as it is and as it can be. Stand up – we can't be what we can't see.
Letting it go, staying quiet, not speaking out, not sticking up for each other – it will be Never Not International Women's Day until we reverse these behaviours. Nads has spent years learning how not to take any shit. Watch, listen and join her and Nicole on sticking up for ourselves.
This is just a little tea talk with Tanarra about the outcomes of a system predicated on the fear of women's success. I've been examining fear a lot in the workplace, and how it manifests, what it keeps us from doing, and frankly, the violence it visits upon us.
There are many challenges when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Differences of dealing with and overcoming them. She encourages us to view diversity as a strength, not a weakness if we're to create meaningful and impactful change. Jess encourages us to engage and lean into our uniqueness.
Our talk is simply a conversation between two friends. So much of what women encounter is seen as ordinary, banal, just the way things are. People accept it as the norm. We hope our stories help people empathise and understand the cultural sea change that's needed if we truly want to change.
Somewhere around 2015 the first of the John genre articles arrived, trumpeting that there are more CEO's named John than women CEO's in their entirety. For the next few years, these articles became as reliable as champagne power breakfast invitations in the lead up to IWD.
With women being fired at 3x the rate of men, it's time to stop promoting talent-less leaders who rely on charm and charisma alone. Confidence ≠ Competence. We all need to shine on the basis of our talent, then women stand a chance.
Constantly aware of being in the privileged position of the white male founder of a successful branding business, Tom is interviewed by Ve on the extra efforts to ensure that Nice and Serious delivers on being a business that strives for equality.
I've been thinking about all the ways women are labeled—in social spaces, at work, in the public sphere. My colleague and friend, Lizzie Bildner, had recently been posting about gendered products/innovation, so I asked her to join me to unpack some of the ways we "package women".
This is a good news story of finding a place to work that has empathy, support and a good dose of balance between work and what really matters in life. male leaders and employers have every opportunity to make an immediate impact on the imbalances – here's what that looks like.
Since enough men drone on and on, this is a short talk. It's all about flipping the question from "what should we do?" to "what should we stop doing?" and dealing with the underlying structural issues that create inequity.
I went for an early morning run in Amsterdam. Sunny, warm, I gear up in my shorts. Men catcalled me, whistled at me. Why? What in my outfit was provocative? Must I cover myself to run in peace? As women, we run for performance, to feel better, get fit, not to provoke or seduce men.
Did you know that there are almost 500 different versions of the name Sam in different languages across the world, across both male and female genders? Tea takes us through the challenge with pronouns and how they might not be a solution – and neither may International Women's Day actually!
There is much research and many stats around the lack of female business ownership. Nancy, Amber and I are the voices behind the stats – we’ve all co-founded and run sustainable creative businesses employing many other designers. I think we have stories worth sharing.
A candid conversation between two women partnering up to start a business together. Raw, honest and ready to take on all the challenges, highs and lows of the creative industry. Welcome to the world Super Keen.
We recorded this discussion to add some context for where Never Not International Women's Day came from. We thought it was important to share our motivations and hopes for what this platform can become and how the world needs to change for the better of everyone.
To make meaningful change in workplaces all over the world we need to recognise that this is a cultural problem. We also need to recognise to show men what they can't see all around them. The norm. The norm that has let stereotypes rule and anyone but a privileged white male suffer.
Tea Uglow takes a broad look at the roots of discrimination. Seen from her 'side' Uglow sees gender as a language issue not a men or women problem. With explanations like why 'sex' is like phone chargers and how gender's like a sneeze, it's not expected IWD fare, but it's raw and from the heart.
Kelly was included on a 'Top 25 creatives in the world' list in 2020. She was 1 of 2 women. How fcked is that? Here she chats with her friend Diane about the many wrongs that need to be righted until it's Never Not International Women's Day.
shEqual is a movement to create advertising equality. Alyssa Shaw, Program Director shares why it's so important that we transform advertising into a force to support gender equality and end violence against women and the next steps in doing something about it.
Every year International Women's Day comes and goes. Rather than go back to business as usual, we say it should Never Not be International Women’s Day. Welcome to a mind-changing, bias-ridding, downright mutinous loop of ideas and musings from women in the creative and associated industries everywhere that will run 24/7/365 on a loop forever, or until...we don’t need to talk about it anymore.
The events of 2025 are already reinforcing that women are still a long way from equality and equity. Globally, women bear the brunt of the physical, emotional and financial impacts of economic, financial and political decisions with their livelihoods affected at almost twice the rate of men.
As International Women’s Day comes and goes, we say enough really is f*cking enough.
Enough of our stoicism. Enough of our patience. Enough of the injustice. It will be Never Not International Women’s Day until all women including women of colour, women with disabilities, and queer or trans women, stop being penalised for being women.
Enough really is f*cking enough
Another day once a year where women will be tapped on the shoulder to be ‘celebrated’ and to ‘inspire’ others. Then we can all go back to ‘normal’ for another 364 days before we have to roll the eyes and do it all over again. Which, let’s face it – is more than a bit f*cked.
So why didn’t we just call this “Always International Women’s Day”? In the spirit of Never not Creative we thought it should be Never Not International Women’s Day. Not just ‘another’ event. Never just another event. Instead an event that won’t go away until… it’s redundant. The idea grew into a never-stopping, continuous and ever-updating loop that will be live forever for you to tune into no matter where you are or what time it is across the world. So that was it.
The only decision left to make was who to invite, and when to launch. The day after Never Not International Women’s Day seemed fitting, and the speakers… well you can see for yourself. Identify as a man? You’re a biiiiig part of the solution, so you’re in there as well. Help us out and get other male eyeballs on this content.
If you’d like to submit a talk, or indeed a Pecha Kucha, poem, song, rant, meme or something that fills in your own personal blank around “It should Never Not be International Women’s Day until…”, share your idea here.
Our Speakers
Tanarra Schneider
Tanarra is a Managing Director at Accenture Interactive, leading Design in the Midwest. Over her 20+ year career, she’s designed everything from corporate education programs to healthcare apps to business models, both as a consultant and as a member of “in-house” design teams. Tanarra is a product of a very eclectic background. She’s been a dancer, cook, event planner, designer and — most recently — a mother.
Tea Uglow
TL Uglow ('Tea') is Creative Director for Google's Creative Lab in Sydney. She works with cultural and creative organisations around the world exploring the space between technology and the arts and what can happen where they intersect. Tea has a history in the arts, a love of literature, and a problem with staying focused. She speaks graphics geek, a bit of web‑dev, some Python, a touch of digital strategy, remedial project management, and really bad French. In May 2018 Tea was celebrated as one of Australia's #OUT50 LGBTQ Leaders by Deloitte and in the same month Editions at Play was awarded a Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award.
Jess Gosling
Jess Gosling is a UK Civil Servant, an Award-Winning Entrepreneur, Public Speaker, Academic & International Strategy / Culture / Diversity / Leadership Consultant. Named 27th in the Top 100 Women Future Leaders 2020, Jess has consistently strived to bridge the gap between culture, diplomacy and innovation. Last year she began her PhD in interdisciplinary thinking, focusing on how soft power is understood, what metrics we use and how successful it is as a term. In January 2021, Jess launched Gosling & Co. to challenge the perceptions around self-promotion, unconscious biases and imposter syndrome facing women and under-represented groups.
Jane Duru
Jane is a writer and editor with over 15 years’ experience in branding and journalism, working across Sydney and London. Jane is passionate about bringing verbal identity to life in distinctive, creative and compelling ways. She believes by bringing a strategic and creative lens to design, we can create the blueprints for how brands use language to communicate. Her work has been recognised and awarded by D&AD, AGDA and The Best awards.
Sumita Maharaj
Sumita is a senior designer with over a decade of experience in broadcast, advertising and design. For Sumita, brands are living, breathing entities. Her approach to design stems from a belief that we live in a dynamic, motion-first world. Her diverse experience and hands-on approach to creativity equips her with the agency to lead cross-functional design projects large and small.
Nicola Mansfield
Over her career, Nicola has pioneered numerous agency services for customer experience, retail strategy, workplace strategy and brand for place. She has built offerings in professional service consultancies, led agencies, created client-side brand functions and founded startups. She has worked across most sectors including place, retail, property and financial. She has worked extensively in Australia, Asia and Europe.
Gabby Lord
Gabby Lord is a small human with a boss surname. More importantly, she’s an Australian designer and art director who has achieved great things wherever she has been across the world. From Australia to Germany, the US and beyond. She is now the Co-Founder of Super Keen Studio with Lauren Wong.
Lauren Wong
Living and working in New York, Lauren is a BIPOC and female-identifying brand strategy leader with deep experience in brand strategy, design research, innovation strategy, and trends analysis. Lauren has a passion for building brands with and for historically excluded founders/communities. She is now the Co-Founder of Super Keen Studio with Gabby Lord.
Alex Skougarevskaya
Alex is a pragmatic design leader and juggler of life (featuring three small children and a dog, Frida) who loves organized chaos and systemic thinking. She was a founding member of the Atlassian Design System and is currently redefining the future of work for Confluence, Atlassian's remote collaborative workspace product for all teams.
Andy Polaine
Dr. Andy Polaine is a designer, educator, coach and writer who helps clients build and grow their own design and innovation capability, transform their organisations and themselves. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, now a standard text for Service Design. He holds a PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney. He can be found online at polaine.com, on Twitter as @apolaine. He writes a popular newsletter called Doctor’s Note and hosts the Power of Ten podcast.
Carol Mackay
After 30+ years running a graphic design firm, Carol pivoted from client-focused projects to consult to the design industry. Now with the Design Business Council Carol uses her experience, and research, to help designers build robust, sustainable businesses, and help businesses integrate, and profit from, design. Carol is a mentor, friend and advocate for many in the creative industry and a great friend of Never Not Creative.
Nancy Bugeja
From first establishing HM, 22 years ago, Nancy has always believed that design is everything – it’s an integral part of everybody’s life. It helps guide people, communicate messages and can offer a solution to even the most complex issue. This philosophy still rings true today. As a creative Managing Director, Nancy is a constant innovator, continually exploring the ways in which her work is applicable to new methods of communication.
Manon Rossi
Manon is a digital marketer with international experience with brands including Nike, L’Oreal and Google. Manon has a passion for challenging ideas and building diverse and inclusive content. She is an advocate for the rights of women and successfully and smartly uses digital platforms to raise awareness and improve outcomes for women.
Tom Tapper
Tom is the Co-Founder and CEO of B-Corp certified agency Nice and Serious. In 2008 he co-founded Nice and Serious with a clear purpose: to make creative work the world needs. Since then he’s exclusively worked with pioneering charities and brands to make creative work that amplifies social and environmental causes. From international brands like IKEA, Unilever, Innocent and Ben & Jerrys, to pioneering charities like Greenpeace, WWF, Rainforest Alliance and Parkrun.
Jess Lilley
Jess is a co-founder at The Open Arms, a creative company that strives to weaponise empathy to help communities thrive. After a near 20 year career as an award-winning writer and creative director in some of the world's most renown ad agencies, Jess realised the culture of the ad world just wasn't working for her (or her family). She joined forces with a couple of great people to create something a little different. Their goal is to make work with a social purpose that leaves their patch of the world a little better than they found it. Jess continues to balance work with personal creative projects across public radio, photography, film and theatre. theopenarms.com.au
Amber Bonney
Amber is the Founder and Managing Director of award-winning business The Edison Agency. Amber’s a branding and identity strategist, guest lecturer, speaker and current President of Creative Women’s Circle. With over 20 years experience across diverse industry sectors, Amber has a vested interest in both traditional and disruptive design methods that activate, provoke and inspire. Amber helps organisations and brands connect, transform, excite, gain trust, disrupt, transform and be seen.
Lizzie Bildner
Lizzie Bildner is a Chicago-based branding and marketing consultant. You’ve probably used one of her client’s apps on your phone (Twitter, Uber, Wingspan) or in real life (Lola). Lizzie’s CV includes an impressive list of the worlds most celebrated design consultancies from IDEO to Interbrand. She’s great friends with Amanda Munilla.
Amanda Munilla
Amanda has spent her career creating brands that match business ambition. She’s delivered strategic and innovative solutions in partnership with global brands like AT&T, Uber, Google, Johnson & Johnson and the Carlsberg Group. Amanda leads a cross-discipline team to deliver work that transforms businesses and the experiences employees and customers have with companies. She’s currently the Managing Director of Wolff Olins in San Francisco (and great friends with Lizzie Bildner).
Daniele Fiandaca
By his own admission, Daniele Fiandaca is the very definition of privilege: white, male, straight, middle class and privately educated. As Founder of Creative Social he often spoke about issues facing the creative industry including the lack of gender diversity. Daniele setup the Token Man community to create a safe space for conversation and get men to improve their education and get a better understanding of the challenges women face. Daniele is Founder of Utopia, a culture change business that re-wires organisations for the Age of Creativity.
Deborah Rey-Burns
Deborah helps events and organisations to connect with the superhero thinkers of today - the thought leaders and change-makers working on the bleeding edge of business and culture. Founder of Propela and Curator-at-large for ReDesign Business and The Future Of_, Deborah has built a global network of moon-shooting experts that can help companies thrive.
Kelly Bayett
Kelly co-founded Barking Owl, a commercial sound and music company in Los Angeles. As a female leader she's focused on inclusivity, female empowerment and cultivating a diverse staff, including 73% women and minorities. It's her mission to give women a voice in the male-dominated advertising and music industries.
Helen Job
Helen Job has worked in future forecasting for two decades, leading multi-disciplinary, global futures, and strategy teams for Flamingo, WGSN and MTV in New York and London. Helen co-founded disruptive futures, insight and strategy collective The Akin and most recently TCOLab, a problem solving lab within creative agency TCO. Alongside her corporate work Helen is an educational practitioner. She conceptualised the Global Trend Forecasting Curriculum for Parsons School of Design, in New York and is a visiting lecturer for the University of the Arts, General Assembly and Hyper Island in London.
Nadine Spencer
Nadine ‘Nads’ Spencer is a Female Leader and a Creative & Content Director with over 15 years experience in the industry. Every single person on this Speaker List has an amazing career both behind and ahead of them, but it’s what we leave for our successors that will make the change. Instead of a list of brands, agencies and awards that she has worked with and won, Nads chose to share her self-written Leadership Philosophy.Dear Reader, I am not a mother, yet I have many children. I am not a teacher, yet I have many pupils. I am not a fighter, yet I will go to war for those I believe in. I am not a healer, yet I will always try mend their wounds. I am not perfect in any way, I fall, I slip, I make mistakes, but I learn. I am not here because of someone else or because of luck. I am not here because I found a way to jump the queue. I am here because this is where I belong, and where I belong is leading next to you.
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About Never Not Creative
Never not creative is a community of creatives who want to make our industry a better place we hope to support inspire and come together to create the ideas tools and solutions that improve the wellbeing of everyone in the industry and promote the value of creativity in the world. Never Not Creative was started because we don’t believe enough is happening to collectively address the future of our industry and some of the challenges it faces.
There are plenty of excellent communities out there that celebrate work and talent, and that provide networking and profile building opportunities. Never Not Creative fills in the gaps to make sure that, as creatives we can look after ourselves and each other. Ensuring we’re at our best for whatever creative challenge is in front of us.
Who’s behind NNIWD?
Prue Jones
Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, Prue is a long term veteran of the creative industries, having graduated from design school in 1993 and gravitating to the world of advertising where she has held multiple CDships, before moving back to the world of design and into corporate. She is also an avid public speaker, National Board Director of the Australian Graphic Design Association, Co-host of Australian Design Radio and dedicated to seeing the creative industry become more inclusive in all aspects.She’s also entirely ticked off that not much has changed in womens’ favour in the 25+ years she’s been in it.
Ve Dewey
Throughout her career, Vanessa has been driven by three things: cultures, connections, and communities. She continually looks both outward and inward to foster inspiration, forge creative communities and encourage risk-taking, curiosity and bold action. As a result her career isn’t a straight line. With her roots in graphic design she has led global re-designs of iconic brands, created her own role in HR which provided educational & inspirational opportunities for 600+ creatives, is now Co-Creator of Never Not Creative, the Global Co-Lead of the Decolonising Design Coalition at the RSA and an MBA candidate at Central Saint Martins London.
Andy Wright
Andy is the creator of the Never Not Creative community and co-chair of the creative, media and marketing industry Mentally-Healthy Change Group. He's been working in the creative industry for many years across the UK and Australia. From running the local offices of global agencies like Interbrand and R/GA, he was also an original co-founder of For The People in Sydney.Andy’s day job is as CEO of Streamtime, project management software with a mission to create healthier creative businesses. When not doing any of the above, you might find him somewhere in Scandinavia chasing the Aurora Borealis and a bit of peace and quiet. Andy’s been part of a number of all-male management teams. He’s keen to redress the balance.
