A rotten comment allows the New York Times to report on the realities of a rotten industry:

A well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director at WPP Group resigned his position yesterday amid an uproar over remarks he made at an industry event about female creative executives. The comments, by Neil French, 61, drew attention to the absence of women at the highest levels of the creative side of the ad industry.

Mr. French told an audience in Toronto on Oct. 6 that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to," saying their roles as caregivers and childbearers prevented them from succeeding in top positions.

[...]

Billed as "A Night with Neil French," the $100-a-person question-and-answer event was to be a look at the creative side of advertising. When Mr. French was asked by a female audience member why there weren't more high-ranking women in creative agency positions, he said it was because they were not good enough.

[...]

The One Club, a nonprofit organization that honors creative work in advertising, will induct a woman into its Hall of Fame next week for the first time since 1974. Out of 40 current inductees, 4 are women, according to the club's Web site. The average annual base salary for female creative directors is $4,000 less than that for men, according to a study by the National Association for Female Executives; men earned $123,000, while women earned $119,000, according to the study.

Cindy Gallop, the former chairwoman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, said such imbalances in agencies were typically starkest in the creative department.

"Senior female creatives are virtually nonexistent," she said. "It's an incontrovertible fact, and nobody has ever come up with any strong or clear answers on the issue."