Feminisation of PR and its consequences- why so many women?

The PR industry in UK has for sometime been regarded as a female profession because of the huge number of female practitioners in the field and in PR training institutions. For example in my PR class, out of about 27 students only 3 are males. No wonder a famous PR author describes PR as a 'pink profession'. When asked in class for reasons for PR being predominantly women's profession the constant themes which came out were women are natural communicators and men do not see it as too challenging for them. Although these points may be debatable they also signify the need to attract more men to the profession to make it more balance and representative of the society and to protect the profession's reputation. This I believe can be achieved by running educational campaigns to target male students in colleges who are still thinking about their career path.

I was shocked to learn that in spite of their dominance in the PR just a handful of women can be found in managerial positions. It is because of this reason that Wednesday the 27th of February's class was quite special to me. I was selected to participate in the debate on the motion "women will always work in the PR industry but will not run it". The motion sounded interesting to me thus I read extensively on it.

I found Tench and Yeomans (2006) very informative and helpful during my research. They identify that although 70% of UK PR practitioners are currently women, research has "found gender inequalities in salaries, salary expectations, hiring perceptions and representation at management level" (p.171). Female practitioners are found mostly in the technician role such as press officers and account executives which prevent them from being actively involved in the decision making process of the organisation.

Several factors can be said to have contributed to women predominantly performing technical roles notwithstanding their dominance in the industry, whilst the men who form about 30% mostly hold management positions. In broad terms this includes the structure of society where women are seen as the 'weaker sex ' and men the 'stronger sex'. Thus women are expected to play subordinate roles to men. This is evident from how society in general perceive women and the adjectives associated with women.

Forinstance when asked in class to give masculine and feminine adjectives, the class came up with words like: Strong, determined, perseverance, not very emotional for men where as feeble, weak, emotional, susceptible to pressure were originated for women. Narrowing it down to PR, women could be seen as performing stereotyped roles such as communication technicians due to reasons which includes:

• The internal structure of an organisation not supporting women taking leadership roles.
• The issue of women going for career breaks either to give birth or raise a young family

However I believe the situation might improve in the near future if our dominance in the field is anything to go by and also through the constant pressure by women groups for equality and fairness for women at the work place.