2026 is a year of significant anniversaries.
There is of course the semiquincentennial of the United States Declaration of Independence.
It is the 60th anniversary of the Notting Hill Carnival. It’s the 50th anniversary of Punk, and the 100th of Britain’s first Grand Prix.
Then there’s the really big one! No not the Brexit vote. It’s 40 years since the first ever Media Week Awards. How many people who won in the first year are still around?
I, and my co-author, Kathryn Jacob, are particularly thinking about anniversaries since this September we’re publishing the 10th anniversary edition of our best selling book, The Glass Wall, success strategies for women at work and businesses that mean business.
An awful lot has happened in the last decade. Many changes, some for the better, some for worse, and some things that should have changed seem not to have shifted at all.
What was going on a decade ago?
Beyoncé produced her best solo album Lemonade. Kanye was a respected artist. Pokémon Go was hugely popular and David Bowie released his last album. We lost David Bowie, Terry Wogan and Prince in 2016. Leicester City won the Premier League against the odds. La La Land, Deadpool, Manchester by the sea and Moonlight were huge at the box office. And of course, Britain voted to leave the EU. Black Lives Matter protests erupted following fatal shootings in the US.
Very few people worked from home. No-one dreamt that a pandemic would change normality to the level that it did.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.
This had particular significance for the authors of The Glass Wall as we appeared on nationwide local radio shows in the United States the day following the election. We had prepared for a discussion about the first woman president, and ended up having a very different conversation about women and equality instead on radio shows from Toledo to Jersey.
When we revised The Glass Wall for its new edition we looked at whether the strategies that so many women had told us that they found useful were still needed, or whether changing times meant they had become redundant.
Spoiler alert – things are not much better than they were a decade ago for women in work, and in some cases things have got worse.
One interviewee (all our interviews are anonymous) who has a very high powered role in America told us that she felt that attitudes had significantly hardened against creating a work environment where everyone had the same opportunity to thrive, no matter their personal circumstances.
In 2026 the advertising and marketing industry saw the gender pay gap climb to a five year high according to one survey. Campaign reported that the gap in adland widened to over 11%. The IPA census reported this year that the number of women in C-suite roles is over 40% for the first time so there is some good news (women are of course though 50% of the population). In the IPA stats although women are 58% of employees, they only receive 53% of salaries. That surely means that essentially some blokes are getting money that should be coming to a woman. The pay gap is highest at the role of business directors. I suggest that if you have this title, and you are a woman, you should get hold of The Glass Wall and study the sections on Anger and how to use it, and specifically the case study in the Resilience chapter on how to negotiate a pay rise.
Our new book is updated with interviews and case studies that examine the impact of remote working on careers, and the experiences of GenZ, who are new to the workplace since the first edition.
There’s still much more to be done to make things better, to establish real fairness. It’s important to women on the way up, but of course it is also crucial for any business needing to make the best use of their talent.
The Glass Wall is available for purchase through all good bookstores, and here.