Why are there so few women PR bloggers?

It’s a great question, and a point that Kami Huyse raised not too long ago. While it has taken me a bit of time to post about it, the subject has been rolling around in my head since I read her piece. As she points out, the PR profession has long been dominated by women*, so why doesn’t that translate into a stronger presence in the PR corner of the blogosphere?

My hunch is that this is carryover from when blogging started—it was considered a tech/geek thing, and you had to know or understand something about programming and HTML to create a site or post to a blog. The tech world is predominantly male, and so it followed that those who had a foot in both universes—tech and PR—would be the first to blog about PR (if you doubt me, I submit as evidence Steve Rubel’s most recent post documenting his 25-year love affair with computers. While I can tell you that my first personal computer was an HP Pavilion, I don’t have pictures of it and I was in my mid-20s at the time. Prior to that, the computers supplied by my college (complete with Leading Edge word processing) and employers had served any computing needs I had).

Of course, with all of the blogging platforms and editing programs available, this should no longer be an issue—so what’s the holdup? Trust me, if you needed to know too much about programming to do this, I wouldn’t be.

* I was immediately reminded of an article that ran in a leading PR publication sometime in 2000-2001 while I was at Fleishman-Hillard about there being “too many” women in PR. The gist of the piece, if I remember correctly, was that too many women in PR pushed down wages and would cause the profession to lose credibility. My boss at the time, the brilliant and talented Marianna Deal, crafted an eloquent response to the piece as a letter to the editor. I wish I had a copy of it, all I remember was that it was just like Marianna: smart, elegant, and to the point.

 

Technorati tags: Public Relations, blogging

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

I think the early adopter theory has some merit. But I also wonder about the time and effort it takes. I had someone ask the question at BlogHer and they responded that women are less self-promotional.

The study you are talking about was called the Velvet Ghetto and came out of IABC, very controversial.

[Jen White]

Kami, thanks for stopping by...that's a very interesting observation re: women being less self-promotional. I think that's true for the PR profession in general--it's always been about the client--that's who is being promoted; you rarely heard about the PR firms behind the coverage received.

I think the transparency demanded by the blogosphere requires PR to rethink that aspect, as it is essential that the company you are working on behalf of be disclosed. Maybe this in turn will encourage women in PR to be a bit more self-promotional.

Thanks for the reminder on the study...I remember it being a very hot topic at the time.