Public relations is considered to be a profession that requires certain skills, such as fast decision making, creativity, writing, time management and similar ones that can be found and developed in both male and female professionals.
We live in a world filled with stereotypical opinions about various work positions, for example, a research conducted by Eurofound ( https://bit.ly/2E3JwEx ) shows that nursery teachers are expected to be female, while working on a construction site would require more male employees. These traditional views of vocations are slowly fading away as the society is becoming more aware and is moderately leaning towards equality or better yet – a neutral view of occupations. However, the question stands: is the PR industry more male or female oriented?
Let's take a closer look - the PR industry is a well known mixture of genders, looking at it in the beginning – the father of PR Edward Bernays was a man, and looking at it now – the business is dominated by women globally (see a great article with women CEOs listed to get some motivation ladies: https://bit.ly/2S4SFio). Despite this, the leaders of PR agencies and company head offices are mostly men, so it is hard to make a decisive conclusion.
Global Women in PR stated for PR Week that 78% of CEO's in top 30 PR agencies in the world are men (https://bit.ly/2kDVDhG). In addition to that, male employees earn an average salary of 61 284£ while female employees earn 55 212£. It goes without saying that in the business world, men still dominate the ''important'' roles, which is completely connected with the history of women's freedom of speech and patriarchy.
This gender pay gap is one of the main issues that is currently occupying the PR branch of business. With this in mind, the ongoing opinion is that women lack the confidence in themselves to, in fact, ask for a raise leaving them with lower salaries while having the same roll and responsibility as their men colleagues.
The image below shows the ratio of men and women on job positions in PR as well as in journalism.
I do not want to conclusively state which gender is leading the PR industry, but from the information gathered it is safe to say that men are holding only the highest positions (CEOs) but not higher ones (as seen on the image - more than 50% of PR managers are women).
Additional reading:
''Why are there so many women in PR''? https://bit.ly/2Ex4Q4y
Great article! Easy to read and useful info, thanks Paula