Why is empowerment limited to the boardroom in advertising?

Every year around International Women’s Day, advertising returns to a familiar visual language. The woman walking into a glass-walled boardroom. The power suit signalling authority. The triumphant moment of “breaking the glass ceiling.”

These images once symbolised real progress. Women entering spaces they were historically excluded from was, and still is, significant. But somewhere along the way, empowerment in advertising began to look similar across brands and campaigns.

The result is a curious paradox: an industry that prides itself on creativity often relies on the same visual shorthand to tell stories about half the population. If empowerment can only be recognised in a corporate boardroom, what happens to the many other spaces where women live, work, create and shape the world?

What about the women who rarely step into boardrooms at all? The farmers, gig workers navigating cities, artisans sustaining generational crafts, small business owners, or homemakers whose labour remains largely invisible to the economy. Their stories rarely find their way into Women’s Day advertising, even though they represent a far larger slice of women’s lived realities.

For creatives within the industry, the question isn’t just about representation anymore. It is about whether Women’s Day advertising is missing the deeper, more diverse realities of women’s lives.

When empowerment became a visual shortcut

Part of the reason these narratives persist lies in the nature of advertising itself. Short-form storytelling often pushes creatives toward instantly recognisable imagery. In a matter of seconds, a film must communicate context, conflict and resolution, leaving little room for nuance.

As a result, visual shorthand becomes a convenient tool. A boardroom signals authority. A power suit signals ambition. A glass ceiling moment signals victory. Over time, these symbols become an almost reflexive way of telling stories about empowerment.

Pallavi Chakravarti, Founder & CCO, Fundamental, explains, “Advertising relies on tropes. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is duration. In a world where storytelling has to be completed in 6, 10, 15 and 20 seconds, advertisers and communicators fall back on imagery that can telegraph ‘empowerment’ at a glance.”

In many ways, this shorthand solves a storytelling challenge. But it also creates another problem: repetition. When the same symbols are used repeatedly, they gradually turn into a formula.

That shorthand, Chakravarti argues, has hardened into an expectation about how women must be portrayed in advertising.

“Because there is some tacit understanding in advertising [not sure where it came from, but it exists] that women must be depicted as overachievers wherever they are - they are supermoms, they are superbosses, they are superwives. In the race to paint women as superhuman in order to empower, we often fail to depict them as human.”

This tension between symbolism and reality is something many creatives are beginning to reflect on. At the same time, some argue that these symbols emerged for a reason.

Ira G, CCO, Toaster INSEA, shares that these tropes did not emerge without context. At one point, they represented meaningful breakthroughs.

“Those images became shorthand because they represented genuine milestones - women entering spaces they were historically excluded from. But over time, shorthand can flatten complexity.”

The cultural conversation around empowerment has evolved significantly since those early portrayals. Today, women’s experiences and their definitions of success span far beyond corporate achievement.

She notes that brands and briefs are slowly beginning to recognise this broader spectrum.

“It can (and must be) be about autonomy, representation, economic independence, creativity, care work, and increasingly briefs are evolving to explore that wider spectrum.”

For advertising, this shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is moving beyond the comfort of familiar imagery. The opportunity lies in telling richer, more diverse stories that reflect the many ways women shape the world around them.

The task for creatives, therefore, is not simply to discard old symbols, but to expand the storytelling vocabulary of empowerment, allowing space for narratives that feel less like shorthand and more like lived reality.

The women missing from the frame

When advertising repeatedly returns to boardrooms as the default site of empowerment, it narrows the spectrum of women’s lives that audiences see. 

Outside urban corporate corridors, millions of women participate in the workforce in ways that look very different from the traditional nine-to-five structure. Yet these roles rarely appear in mainstream Women’s Day narratives.

Chakravarti notes that the way brands define their target audiences often dictates which stories make it into campaigns and which are quickly dismissed.

“For example, if a brand were to show the journey of a grandma learning to drive there’d be many questions asked. Are we selling to grandmas? What about aspiration? Our core TG is an urban young woman who travels abroad 1.5 times a year and enjoys sushi. Will this speak to her?”

At that point, she says, such ideas are often quietly dropped from the conversation.

“Enter the corporate barracuda wearing a pastel pantsuit and a killer smile,” Chakravarti adds.

For Ira G, the limitation lies in assuming that empowerment unfolds only in visible, dramatic moments.

“The truth is that empowerment rarely happens in neat cinematic moments, crafted in the confines of a meeting room or on a set. It happens in homes, classrooms, small businesses, farms, studios, and communities every single day.”

When advertising repeatedly frames empowerment within a corporate context, it inadvertently sidelines the richness of how women shape society across different roles and environments.

“When we only show women succeeding in corporate spaces, we miss the richness of how women actually shape the world around them - starting from within.”

That richness includes the invisible and informal economies where many women operate. 

From women running self-help groups in rural India and delivery partners balancing multiple gigs in urban centres, to mothers managing households alongside micro-enterprises, empowerment often unfolds far away from conference tables.

Occasionally, however, campaigns do attempt to step outside the familiar boardroom narrative and spotlight women whose work rarely receives mainstream visibility.

One such example is Urban Company’s #ChhotiSoch campaign, created with Talented, which explores the stigma surrounding women working in blue-collar professions. The film follows a young massage therapist who returns home to find her younger brother upset after being mocked by neighbourhood boys for her profession. 

The campaign draws attention to a reality many women navigate: that dignity of labour is often conditional. Professions involving physical or care work are frequently undervalued or misunderstood, particularly when performed by women.

Similarly, the #SaluteTheFarmHER campaign by the DS Group, created with digital marketing agency Grapes, addressed another form of invisibility, the absence of women farmers in media representation. Despite women forming a significant part of India’s agricultural workforce, visual culture around farming continues to default to the image of a male farmer.

The campaign called for something deceptively simple: populate media spaces with images of women farmers alongside men. 

In a follow-up film directed by Titus Upputuru, fields appear to be worked by invisible figures, a visual metaphor for the near-erasure of women farmers from mainstream imagery despite their presence in the agricultural economy.

These campaigns do not entirely rewrite the rules of Women’s Day storytelling, but they signal what becomes possible when advertising looks beyond corporate corridors. By acknowledging women whose labour exists outside office buildings, they broaden the conversation about what empowerment can look like.

And perhaps that widening of the frame is where more authentic representation begins. But campaigns like these remain the exception rather than the norm in Women’s Day advertising.

When empowerment means being everything at once

Ironically, when campaigns do move beyond the boardroom, they often jump to another extreme, portraying women as extraordinary figures who seamlessly juggle work, home and ambition. In doing so, the industry replaces one narrow frame with another.

For Sindhu Panicker, NCD, Enormous, this narrative has become equally exhausting.

“Every Women’s Day, I find myself writing or seeing ads that either glorify women as superheroes or talk about all the struggles they face in society. And honestly, I’m a little tired of both.”

She questions why stories about women must always revolve around achievement, endurance or sacrifice.

“Why does every story about a woman have to be about conquering something, proving something, or carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders?”

In the rush to inspire, advertising often forgets the power of ordinary moments.

“I sometimes wish we could make an ad where a woman isn’t achieving anything spectacular. She isn’t multitasking, breaking barriers, or being a supermom. She’s just being.”

Panicker’s vision of representation is almost radical in its simplicity.

“Sitting, resting, doing nothing remarkable. No pressure to be perfect at work, perfect at home, perfect everywhere. Just a normal woman, having an ordinary moment and that being enough.”

For her, the most progressive portrayal might simply be the most human one.

How creatives can push the narrative forward

Despite these patterns, many creatives believe agencies have more influence than they sometimes realise.

Ira G notes that while brands may arrive with a predetermined narrative, the brief is rarely the final word.

“Creative teams often underestimate how much influence they actually have. Brands come with a starting narrative, but they’re also looking for cultural intelligence - and that’s where we come in as a strong and valuable agency partner.”

She argues that the most impactful work emerges when agencies challenge and evolve the brief rather than simply executing it.

“That negotiation is where the best work happens, because the job of a creative agency isn’t just to execute a brief but to evolve it.”

Chakravarti, however, emphasises that this flexibility depends heavily on the client relationship.

“Depends entirely on the brief, the way you parse it, the questions you ask a client and the willingness of said client to pull back and make changes where necessary.”

She shares that not every brand is ready to take risks, and that is a reality agencies must navigate.

“There are always those who are open to being challenged and try to expand the boundaries within which a brand operates and equally there are those who prefer to play it safe, because it has worked for them so far,” adds Chakravarti.

Ultimately, the ability to move beyond formulaic storytelling depends on a shared willingness between brand and agency to rethink what empowerment looks like.

Rethinking ‘Women’s Day’ storytelling

Another factor shaping ‘Women’s Day’ advertising is the very nature of the occasion itself. With March 8 becoming a fixed calendar moment, campaigns risk falling into predictable patterns.

Ira G shares, “Any cause that becomes a fixed calendar or ‘topical’ moment risks becoming formulaic. When March arrives, every brand suddenly wants a statement about empowerment, and that volume inevitably produces patterns.”

The challenge, she suggests, is to treat the day as part of a broader cultural conversation rather than a one-day communication exercise.

She says, “The real creative challenge is treating Women’s Day not as a ritual but as a cultural conversation that happens 365 days a year, not just on or in the run up to March 08.”

In other words, the shift away from boardroom-only narratives may begin with recognising that empowerment itself cannot be confined to a single storyline, symbol or day.

If the boardroom is no longer the sole stage for empowerment, what should replace it?

Perhaps nothing singular at all. Empowerment does not belong to one profession, one aesthetic or one storyline.

The future of Women’s Day storytelling may lie in expanding the frame, recognising the countless spaces where women shape the world in visible and invisible ways. For advertising, that means moving beyond a narrow visual vocabulary of glass ceilings and power suits to embrace the many forms ambition, resilience and independence can take.

Most importantly, it may mean allowing women in advertising narratives to simply exist as human beings.