This year’s ad invites a look at Audi’s track record on promoting women to leadership roles. Audi has
no women on its six-person executive team. Its supervisory board (the German equivalent to a U.S. board of directors) is only
16% women. That’s below the already-low
average of 20% for female representation on corporate boards of Fortune 500 firms, and significantly lower than BMW’s
30%.
In defense, Audi spokeswoman Miranda Harper says the company signed the
White House Equal Pay Pledge last year, and its graduate analyst program has a minimum requirement of 50% women. Marketing director Angelo says Audi ran an internal salary analysis, and after accounting for factors like “individual performance, experience, and tenure in the job,” it determined that it now has “equal pay for equal work.” But Harper wouldn’t comment on whether Audi has made any gender-based salary adjustments over the past two years. By contrast, companies like
Salesforce and
Exelon have been vocal about taking such steps.