One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? An Analysis of European PR Practitioners’ Views on the Position of Women in the PR Industry (2009-2015)

It has been well established that Public Relations is a gendered industry, but the one in which women earn less and face glass ceiling. Recently, researchers also reported on problems with networking and mentoring. Many of these findings have been reported in annual European Communications Monitor (ECM), the largest European research project focusing on trends in Public Relations through self-assessment of PR practitioners. In this particular paper, using the approach of liberal feminism while embracing the view of radical feminism of patriarchy, we looked at results from the ECM in the period between 2009 (when the gender came to the agenda for the first time in this research) and 2015 in an attempt to discuss how far have feminism got in achieving equality of women with men, at least when findings from the European Communications survey are in stake. The results show that inequality still exists not only in traditional areas of inequality such as the wage gap and the glass ceiling, but also in other areas such as job security and mentoring. Nevertheless, it seems that inequality transforms when one issue gets tackled and new issues continue to arise, with which it can be said that the social structure is still based on inequality between genders and that while issues can be tackled, the whole problem of equality feels like one step forward and two steps back. The conclusion of the paper is that feminists need to work with men to tackle patriarchy and with that also inequality of genders, including in Public Relations