Women in PR

It was 2019 when the Oxford Dictionary added the term “fake news” to its list of definitions. It turns out that the term has been around since the 1890s – something to do with a story about a mine in Milwaukee! Anyways, for communicators, fake news means trouble, for there is a lot more nuance there which encompasses accuracy of information, intent and effect.

Our guest this episode: Carmen Romero, NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy since October 2016. She’s a former journalist and foreign affairs correspondent (awarded too) who has covered events such as the revolution in Romania, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Chechnya, the crisis in Kosovo, and the NATO campaign in former Yugoslavia.

Today we’re travelling back in time to the Kommunikations Kongress, one of Germany’s biggest events for communication specialists. Last year it was among the first ones to go hydrid featuring everything from face-to-face socially distanced sessions, online only sessions and live streamed sessions.

The interview you are going to hear was recorded there, in the bright lights of the big stage of the Congress Center in Berlin. The guest: Monika Schaller, Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications & Responsibility at Deutsche Post DHL Group.

A former financial journalist for Bloomberg, Monika has led communications and CSR teams in the banking sector such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs before moving to Deutsche Post DHL group. She’s also a member of the German chapter of Global Women in PR and a member of the German Board of Trustees of the International Journalists´ Program.

We chatted about yoga and finding balance at work and life, about leading global teams and about inspiring and supporting younger colleagues.

Season 2 of Women in PR: an exceptional series, recorded in exceptional circumstances with exceptional people: guests, producers and supporters alike.

Like with the previous edition we’ll swing between research and practice and travel from Germany, to Estonia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States and South Africa.

There’s so much discussion nowadays about leadership and management styles and so much questioning of whether gender makes any difference. There’s equally as much talk about PR’s ability to talk and do business. So, for this episode we’re turning to a powerful duo that fit all requirements: they are leaders, managers, business owners and women.

Alina Damaschin and Eliza Rogalski co-own, according to the 2019 Holmes Report’ Global Creative Index, Romania’s most creative independent PR agency (that means that are the 5th most creative in the EMEA region and 9th in the world… quite an achievement!). That means that they take on daring projects, some of them activist in nature, getting involved in solving what they perceive to be social problems in Romania together with their clients.

Alina has an advertising background (just between us, she also studied here at Quadriga University in Berlin) while Eliza’s background is in journalism. What’s more, they often refer to each other as sisters rather than business partners and when it comes to business, they often speak more about values and purpose than anything else.

Are you still using AVEs, advertising value equivalent, to report your PR success? That’s bad, really bad. There are ways in which public relations contribution to the organizational success can be assessed and that requires long term measurement and evaluation. AI and machine learning can help here with the day to day numbers, but the overall picture and the responsibility of tracking and reporting that stays with PR. Which is why critical thinking and solid research skills are the solutions.

So, here it is, measurement and evaluation: our topic this week. Our guest: Johna Burke, the Global Managing Director of AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. An American that carries always a book in her bag, Johna choose PR because it was fun. Now, more than 25 years later, she’s often traveling to remind practitioners that fun and measurement and evaluation go together.

Can public relations practitioners be activists in their own organizations and oppose, stand up, speak against practices or decisions they think unethical or unjust? Should they risk their jobs? And if they do, how can they avoid deepening existing divisions or creating new ones?

Dr Derina Holtzhausen is the authors of Public Relations as Activism: Postmodern Approaches to Theory and Practice, a book awarded with the PRIDE Book Award from the National Communication Association for outstanding contribution to public relations theory. Originally from South Africa and with an extensive corporate experience as well, Derina is currently the dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Lamar University in Texas, United States.

Who takes care of the PR practitioners and their mental health? With an always-on type of work culture prevailing, how do we take care of colleagues and who do we ensure that we, personally, can do both deep work or that we can disconnect to recharge. We’ll be tackling mental health in PR this week with Rachel Royall.

She’s the Communication Director of IBM’s UK Healthcare & Life Sciences. Prior to joining IBM her career covers mostly public sector. She is also a very active member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and a fellow of the Institute for Internal Communication, and a lot of her work, public engagement and teaching speaks about PR’s power and duty to do good. And speaking of good, we’ll also talk ethics, not codes of ethics but rather what to do when unethical behavior are seen and how to expel those practitioners and practices.

PR girls. PR bunnies. PR mause. What comes to mind when you hear such descriptions of communication professionals? How are they dressed?

Dr Kristin Demetrious is our guest this week. She’s the co-editor of the book “Gender and public relations: Critical perspectives on voice, image and identity,” where she has a chapter dealing specifically with the politics of gender and how these play out in two cases of sexual harassment involving Australian PR practitioners.

The workforce in PR and communication agencies in particular is primarily female. Female staff in German PR agencies represent about

69%, in the US is at over 70 percent and in Romania above 95 percent.

This is what we call feminization of the workforce: when a profession is dominated by and associated with women. Now this has a variety of implications: on perceptions of the profession and its professionalism and contribution to society, on pay and on career progression.

If a job is perceived as feminine, salaries tend to be lower and its contribution to community/society is diminished as less innovative, less ground-breaking.

For PR in particular, the general assumption is that because women are naturally more social, more collaborative, they are made for PR, for building relationships and maintaining them. Is it so or is that a social expectation that we are fulfilling?

And while PR job market continues to grow and salaries tend to be higher than in other industries (at least at entry level), with some exceptions, leadership positions in PR still continue to be dominated by men. How do they get there?

Dr Liz Yeomans has recently retired but remains rather active, continuing to supervise doctoral works and reviewing for public relations and communication management journals. She’s been working with Leeds Business School at Leeds Beckett University since 1994, having had an extensive career in government and local government communications prior to that.

Check out Dr Yeomans' book - Public Relations as Emotional Labor - here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315687162

What do you think of when someone mentions “public relations”? What images come to mind: is it someone behind the scenes organizing an event, is it someone speaking with the press on behalf of an organization, is it someone deeply absorbed into research following complex dashboards and reports. No really, what comes to your mind?

There is research out there that explores the portrayals of PR in movies and series or in the media. There is also research that investigates the perceptions that journalists and politicians hold of PR practitioners. There is also research inquiring what are the perceptions that practitioners themselves have about their profession…fair enough, the latter one is mine (is a paper I presented in 2018 at BledCom, a practitioner and academic conference hosted in Slovenia, based on a game with PR memes we play in my Applied Communications course at Quadriga).

Anyways, there are some pretty persistent negative perceptions as well as a lot of hope and enthusiasm for the profession. But one of the images that sticks shows PR in a tactical position, reacting to whatever others do or say, trying to protect an employer or client no matter what… not a strategist, not a consultant, not a trusted advisor with access and part of the decision-making process. So instead of asking where do these images come from, I think the better questions to ask would be why do they still linger on and are they the same everywhere?

With this episode we travel to Russia and quiz our quest about how PR is understood and done over there. Irina Gushchina started her career as a journalist of a business weekly magazine, and then has worked for several years in prominent Russian and international PR agencies including Edelman Russia. In 2007 she moved into the in-house world, first joining Pfizer Russia and then Abott and Uber. After almost 20 years in media and PR, Irina is running KFC’s communications and is responsible for Russia, Commonwealth of Independent States (or CIS), Central & Eastern Europe. She is also an alumna of Quadriga University.