It’s one of the most prolific and most incorrect stereotypes about PR practitioners – that of the party planner, publicist, product promoter. Perhaps because editing press releases doesn’t make for compelling television, the portrayals of PR pros in the media tend to overemphasize a glamorous lifestyle with characters that are really more like caricatures. More often than not, these portrayals are of women. Arik Hanson recently wondered whether these portrayals were good or bad for the PR industry, and David Mullen had an excellent comment:
I think it has contributed to the decline in young men entering in or interested in public relations. Most men don’t want to plan parties for a living. They want a seat at the big table, so they major in marketing instead.
If I think back to my PR classes, I can count about nine or 10 men in them – combined. If you took a stroll across the street to the business school’s marketing department, you’d find it reversed. At my undergraduate institution, the business school has a 64%/36% male-to-female ratio, while the journalism school is more like 20%/80%.
So how does PR shake the perception that the profession is not just party planning and that practitioners can and do have a seat at the table? How does PR gender-balance the profession to ensure a variety of viewpoints and approaches? Here’s what I think:
1. Stop using “fluffy” topics for writing assignments in PR classes.
Writing is the absolute crux of our profession. In college, I remember writing news releases about Peach festivals, charity fundraisers and student “awareness” groups. All of these assignments helped me learn the structure of a news release and proper AP style, but the reality was that in my first two jobs after college I was working for companies who were almost never going to pitch a light-hearted story to the features editor of a local daily. PR students can benefit from learning to write technical press releases intended for trade publications. If you can discuss the benefits of non-halogenated flame-retardant resins in automotive wiring harness applications, you can handle a Peach Festival. PR professionals who can effectively distill an organization’s or a product’s key attributes will certainly be invited to the big table.
2. Ensure that business financials are a key part of the PR curriculum.
Every PR professional should know how to read a balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. This is the language that our clients and stakeholders communicate in, so we need to be fluent in it, too. Students should have to practice writing quarterly earnings releases and Q&A statements about them. The boys over in the business school may be lured back to PR if they recognize that someone in the organization needs to be responsible for communicating how a merger or divestiture or new product innovation will impact a company’s bottom line, and that someone is typically a PR person.
3. Integrate business and PR students more frequently.
In my undergraduate classes, there was almost no interaction with business majors. Despite a lot of similarities between PR and marketing, there were very few business students as members of PRSSA, and very few activities that brought students from those two schools together. Why not pair up a PR and marketing class for a capstone project? Have them develop a new product, define a target market, research feasibility and time to profitability, create a launch plan, and evaluate and measure success? As many comments on Arik’s post noted, this would help business students get a better understanding for the value of PR, before they’ve even started their careers.
4. Show that event planning isn’t just parties.
Sex and the City’s Samantha and her ilk are publicists, a segment of PR that’s it’s own animal. But there is a lot of event planning that goes on in PR – and it’s not just parties. Trade shows, customer visits, executive retreats, media receptions – all of these events take organization, creativity and a strategic mindset to be successful. Guys may not be intrigued by the idea of choosing table linens or creating invitations for a charity auction, but how about creating an interactive booth display for a trade show and planning aspects like a media interview schedule, product display demos, executive speeches, and investor cocktail reception? These are the kind of events that give a PR pro lots of visibility to those at the big table, and if you can succeed in pulling off events like this, you’ll get a seat there, too.
These are just a few suggestions that might help more males feel that PR is a legitimate profession where they can play with the big boys. What else do you think could tip the scales and lure more male students out of the business school and into PR?
Maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where those negative portrayals of PR professionals on TV include a few men, too.
The typical “defense” often heard about campaigns like this is that they are intended only for a specific target audience. To me, that’s a fancy way of saying, “if this offends you, then you’re not our target audience, so please shut up and leave us alone.” Granted, PepsiCo did apologize for its iPhone app, but it’s hard to believe that they couldn’t have anticipated a backlash before ever launching it.