Female Influence on the Public Relations Industry: Guest Post by Kristin Impallaria

As society continues to progress, the PR industry becomes more well known. Public relations is a profession that is refreshingly different from others, because of its female dominate approach. Nearly 80 percent of the PR industry is comprised of women. This profession gives women the opportunity to earn leadership roles over men, and excel in many aspects of the industry based off of female qualities and importance.

Women are more likely to be unsurpassed in the industry than men for many reasons. Women aren’t afraid to express themselves and their opinion of a topic or issue at hand in great detail. This skill can be used as a great advantage when gaining the attention and support of people, while working in a PR industry.

PR daily’s article Are Women Better Communicators than Men? Sarah Skerik, the vice president of social at PR Newswire, says that women possess empathy, and empathy is key in the PR industry.

“The best communicators, in my opinion, are people who have a lot of empathy for their audience, and can deliver what their audience needs,” she said.

For Skerik, this means being aware of body language and adjusting how you’re communicating accordingly.

“This can mean shifting from a highly analytical, ‘just the facts’ delivery in a meeting with your CEO to considering the potential emotional responses of online audiences as when planning a digital communications campaign,” she explained.

“Are women better at this than men? Possibly. But it seems to me that empathy is more crucial to communication effectiveness than a tendency toward chattiness.”

The Public Relations Institute of Australia (Pria) also published an article titled Women in PR: Why they win with similar content on empathy, along with much more information on female dominance in PR.

One reason being, that women are better than men at sharing power. Instead feeling the need to be in charge, women are content with working together as a team, and sharing the role and responsibility of empowerment. Women notice hard work and dedication and like to acknowledge hard work, as well as be acknowledged when appropriate.

Another reason women are more successful in the industry is conversation. Women are more likely to ask in-depth questions, and dig deeper into a topic than men, who prefer to cut to the chase. Women enjoy speaking and listening, and tend to use these skills to their advantage. One-way women use their positive skills, is with networking. Women make networking a key tool when working in the PR industry. They use it to gain more of an understanding of a topic, and to help them stay updated on their information. The Internet is a powerful thing, and could be used by the PR industry to communicate faster and better to others, than any other resource. Using this tool frequently is of extreme value in the PR profession.

There are many noticeable differences between men and women. But there is one difference in particular that contributes towards women’s success in the profession. The difference is the use of creativity. For women, the sky is the limit. Women don’t face a challenge, when it comes to being creative. Women have the ability to come up with new ideas at any time. The mind of a woman has no limitations or constraints. For women, the world of opportunity is endless.

PR daily’s 12 Things PR Women can’t live without explains a lot about a woman working in the PR industry.