an interview with Dr Liz Yeomans
Summary
In this episode of Women in PR, host Ana Adi discusses the feminization of public relations and the concept of emotional labor with Dr. Liz Yeormans. They explore how emotional labor applies to PR, the gender dynamics within the profession, the impact of unconscious bias on the gender pay gap, and the challenges women face in breaking the glass ceiling. The conversation also touches on the evolving role of PR practitioners as trusted advisors and the importance of education and training in addressing gender inequalities
Takeaways (AI generated with Riverside.fm)
- PR is often viewed as a feminine profession, leading to the concept of the ‘pink ghetto’.
- Emotional labor is a significant aspect of public relations, influencing ethical responsibilities.
- Gender segregation in PR roles leads to disparities in career advancement.
- Unconscious bias contributes to the gender pay gap in the PR industry.
- Women are underrepresented in senior roles despite being a majority in the workforce.
- Education and training are crucial for addressing gender inequalities in PR.
- The role of trusted advisor in PR may perpetuate emotional labor characteristics.
- Networks for women in PR are emerging to support career advancement.
- The gender pay gap persists even after accounting for career patterns.
- There is a complex interplay between emotional and knowledge-driven roles in PR.
Trascript (AI generated with Riverside.fm)
Ana Adi (00:03.81)
This is Women in PR, a weekly podcast about inspiring women that have embraced PR and made it shine, changing it for the better every day. It’s about mentors, founders, researchers, role models, leaders. I am Ana Adi. Women in PR is brought to you by Quadriga University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and professionalpodcasts.com.
Ana Adi (00:34.942)
Is PR a feminine profession? And if it is, what does that mean? In this episode, we’ll be discussing the so-called pink ghetto, the feminization of public relations and its effects. This week’s guest is Dr. Liz Yeomans. She’s been working with Leeds Business School at Leeds Beckett University in England since 1994.
having had an extensive career in government and local government communications before that. She’s also the author of a book called Public Relations as Emotional Labor, in which she discusses how, when, and why emotionality applies to public relations and how this influences our understanding of the profession’s ethical responsibilities.
Ana Adi (01:27.116)
Liz, thank you so much for your time and welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me Anna. It’s a pleasure. Now Liz, in your recently released book you speak a lot about public relations as emotional labor. What are the characteristics of emotional labor and how do they apply to PR? Okay, well the theory goes back to a sociologist who
wrote in the 1980s, 1983, published a book, The Managed Heart, Commercialization of Feeling. This was Arlie Russell Hochschild, who’s still around, I believe. And she coined the term emotional labor to refer to jobs that involve face-to-face interaction with the public, the need for people in those jobs to manage their own emotions and displays of feeling.
to elicit a desired emotional response in other people. And another characteristic is that it allowed the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control. So there were sort cultural features involved in that. And her classic study looked at the Delta airline cabin crew, most of whom were women.
And she maintained that because half of women’s jobs call for emotional labour, that it was very much a women’s issue and it particularly related to those who were kind of trained or socialised for this kind of work who came from the middle classes, especially in Anglo and Northern European cultures where traditionally there was a high degree of emotion management.
This was her thesis. It was very much driven by a kind Marxist worldview in which she contended that it wasn’t the factories making things that created this sort of phenomenon, but it was about this exercise of involving face-to-face interaction and the management of feeling, which she said had
Ana Adi (03:50.87)
negative consequences. This was for status, identity, and also it could lead to a loss of self, a loss of a sense of self. So was a very, very critical piece of work that she created, but it spawned a huge range of studies that have been done since the 1980s.
And in more recent years, there’s been a kind of renewed interest in this research because it applies to so many occupations. While she was focusing on cabin crew, there have been lots of studies looking at people in call centers in those very, very clear-cut service industries. But in more recent years, there’s been a focus on professions and the focus on the professions such as law and medicine.
and from my point of view public relations warrants that renewed interest I think. What it actually means for those people in those service face-to-face roles and in public relations that’s people who are providing the services in agencies and this is my main focus.
Right, you say you’re looking to agencies in particular. Does this thesis of emotional labor that you have implies that women would be expected to almost have a duty of care for their clients when their male colleagues will not? To a certain extent, it does imply that, particularly when we see the segregation, the sex, what’s called the gender segregation, but it’s actually
segregation by sex role, by sex. So we look at men and women, we look at what they’re doing in public relations and for some years now there’s been this split. Those who are doing a lot of the relational work and doing a lot of the technical work, doing a lot of the day-to-day work are women who are employed in large numbers in agencies at the junior through to middle
Ana Adi (06:12.366)
levels and some making it beyond that middle level but far fewer women are making it to board level and therefore we have a split in the UK for example 64 % women you know versus 36 % men as a whole and then when we look at the board level 36 % of women are actually at board level so there’s a disparity there because
Clearly there should be more of them at that level if we look at the gender split across the board.
Right. Well, that is quite correct, right? If you think in terms of funnels and how you have a workforce that is going to lead, thinking also of meritocracy, so exceeding to positions and higher on the hierarchy based on merit. The question is, how does it happen that the funnel is more giving with some than with others? But there’s something else about emotional labor as well.
Could you clarify whether the moment a profession is linked more thoroughly with emotional labour, what happens with gender perceptions? I’m just thinking in the past, males, for instance, would shy away from entering nursing because of this association of emotional labour.
and one of the things that resulted is that they might have different job titles. Is that something that you’ve observed happening in public relations? How far does this go? Well, certainly it’s an interesting but very complex situation, I think, and it’s very difficult to put your finger on. One of my reasons for looking at emotional labour was
Ana Adi (08:14.958)
Finding a way to explain why we have this gender split, what was once a male dominated profession switched somewhere around the 1980s, 1990s to become a feminized profession. And with feminized professions goes a whole host of associations. What that means, possibly the…
you know, driving down of salaries, the loss of status, and you know, all kinds of negative consequences. And I would argue that’s probably what’s happened in public relations. So what’s going on? Yes, the job involves a lot of relational work. And, you know, there is a perception that women are good at communicating, women
see themselves as good communicators which is why I think they are driven towards these kinds of roles. So there’s a certain amount of self segregation or self selection involved in the process alongside stereotypes of what women do best and what men do best in that kind of situation and it’s not just public relations we’re looking across the whole of the you know
range of professions and the communications industry, you in advertising we have a similar situation. So we’ve got, you know, this phenomenon which, you know, we’re told about because of regular surveys that are done and those figures don’t seem to shift in terms of the gender split. So I’m interested in, you know, what’s going on behind all of this and it’s a lot more, I think it’s a lot more complex than, you know,
one would like to admit, you know, it’s not a straightforward cause and effect, in other words. There’s a lot going on and it’s to do with things like gender socialization from when men and women, you know, are growing up and the kinds of roles that they might expect to be doing.
Ana Adi (10:27.534)
But I guess the question is what you know, draws men to these roles as well because you know If they’re getting to the top what what is it that makes them more? You know Deserving of those of those top level jobs. So my research is is kind of Trying to plumb the depths of what emotional labor means now in the 20th
you know 21st century and you know is it actually really intrinsic to the professional role which some theorists contend it is. I mean in academia and other service orientated jobs you know the professional role involves a certain level of emotional support and care say for students and in a client related role there’s the
care of the client and the ability to relate to the client in a constructive way, which is going to deliver the results that the client wants. And I would say part of that, you know, what is it the client wants is about being looked after and about being responded to, and that this is where the emotional labor comes into play. So it’s not just about providing a service.
in a very technical sense, it’s about providing a full package of services which intrinsically involve emotional labour.
Now this is very, very reminiscent to the velvet ghetto study that was undertaken by the IABC in the 1980s. I mean, I remember that one of the findings was that both men and do not, but particularly women, do not belong to PR management. And that was because they were
Ana Adi (12:33.25)
perceived, they seen to be better at these technical jobs, at these relationship building or maintaining aspects of the profession. Would you say that that is still the case? It probably is the case, but I would doubt whether anyone would want to talk about it in such an explicit way. Certainly, think practitioners are not
these issues in a very explicit way. For example, a piece of research that came out in 2017 was trying to understand the reason for the gender pay gap in the UK PR profession. And this was a piece of qualitative research conducted by the CIPR. And this was actually looking at what it was that created problems for women who were trying to
get to the higher levels within the profession? What were the factors? And I think the majority of the interview participants were agency people. I’d have to check on that, but I believe they were. And there were a whole range of factors involved in why they were not getting hired or promoted. And one of the factors put forward was
or reasons put forward was something called unconscious bias. Now, unconscious bias has become a kind of popular term that’s used in relation to inequalities in hiring and promoting people, not just from a gender perspective, but from a diversity perspective as a whole. Why it is that, for example, people from ethnic minority backgrounds are not being hired or promoted.
And in this piece of research, unconscious bias was mentioned. And in other words, men who were at the top of the profession or running their own businesses or comprising board members, largely comprising board members, were hiring people in their own image. They were hiring people like themselves who they knew could do a job. But also in…
Ana Adi (14:51.95)
In doing so, they were perhaps making some assumptions, stereotypical assumptions about women’s capability to do those jobs. And this was considered to be a factor, as I said, in why women were not getting there. So there is perhaps this unconscious bias is a little bit of a…
a polite term for really discrimination, is what we’re talking about. it, but unconscious bias is a kind kind way of saying it. In other words, people should be well aware that, you know, they can’t make discriminatory decisions when hiring and promoting staff, but, you know, perhaps some lack of awareness around that could be a reason. I don’t know.
But this is a term that’s banded around quite a lot and there are lots of other factors. So assumptions about, you know, related to that, is assumptions about women’s caring role, you know, either for children or for elderly parents or whatever, that they might not want to go for a higher level job because of that or because they, you know, they’re reaching a
to senior age, know, so those sorts of reasons. Then we have, you know, but we have a clear gap in the gender pay gap data that’s come out of the industry. There is a, you know, gender issue because once everything’s been taken into account to do with women’s career patterns, such as part-time work,
career breaks to have families, all kinds of factors taken into account. There is still a pay gap of around, I think, to six thousand pounds in the UK, which cannot be explained. And this is where the gender issues come into play. There can be no other reason other than the fact that women are women and therefore gender ideology and beliefs about women and what they can and cannot do come into play.
Ana Adi (17:13.902)
So how do we get out of this unconscious bias? mean, in a sense, the term seems to be excusing itself and ourselves saying that you do not realize you’re doing this. It’s a mistake that you’re not willingly committing. So how do we move on from here? You teach, or at least you used to teach for quite a lot of years in academia.
You’re carrying out research. How would you see us moving out from this corner where history and practice has brought us? Well, I think we’ve got to remember, first of all, that the whole issue of gender inequalities in public relations is quite a recently published phenomenon within the industry. The research that’s been going on over the years since the 1980s
has possibly not reached practitioners. Certainly, I’m talking about the UK perspective here, has only been a talking point, let’s say, for the past five years. you know, when we’ve looked, when we look back at past staff, sorry, past surveys, state of the profession surveys in the UK,
There’s been all kinds of excuses as to why there’s this gender split that I talked about earlier, why it is there are so many women and yet they’re not realizing their potential and not reaching these top roles. And they’ve been explained away and explained away, but in last few years, and it’s partly to do with the fact that there are some women breaking through and there’ve been presidents…
of the CIPR and the last two presidents of the CIPR have been women. So there’s been a lot more focus on, you know, why, you know, research as to why these things are happening. So it’s because it’s being talked about, I would say that’s a good thing. But when we start talking about gender and say feminism and ways in which women can try to
Ana Adi (19:32.094)
break the glass ceiling and break some of the disparities within the profession, then it comes back to education and training. And I can’t see any way out of that. And I’m not sure that universities have been grabbing hold of this as much as they should have done. And the profession itself perhaps hasn’t really addressed these issues in the training for…
practitioners, because the focus has been on knowledge, you know, becoming a more strategic practitioner, becoming better at counselling, better at strategizing, all these sorts of things, these technical and strategic skills have been a very, very clear focus. But a little bit like some of the other social questions around PR, such as ethics, you know,
Debates have only recently come to the fore, I think, within the practice. But I think that the research and the practice should be kind of informing each other and we need to have those discussions. I mean, on the positive side, there are women’s networks that are being revitalized. In the UK, women in PR is one of them, and that’s part of a global network of
There are related networks. There’s one in Germany. There’s Women in PR Deutschland, for example. There’s an organization called Global Women in PR. So these are now starting to connect and I think try to provide some focus for women who want to gain these leadership roles. And there are ways in which they can do that through mentoring schemes
networking with other women. But I mean these are self-help schemes and I will say that perhaps they could do a lot more to encourage junior practitioners and really reach out to junior level people, women to encourage them to do similar things. It’s not just in other words for senior level women which currently this is the situation but hopefully that will
Ana Adi (21:58.478)
change. But coming back to what we can do in education, think universities can do a lot more to focus on what the job’s really about, you know, and what’s required and also what kind of barriers women might face. Those I don’t think have been really discussed.
Ana Adi (22:22.806)
It’s interesting that you mentioned advising and that made me think of something completely different. We were talking about the glass ceiling and breaking through the glass ceiling, which is in a sense all in a way of Grunig’s excellence theory, right, about empowering the public relations practitioner, the function in particular, the senior practitioner.
Also a product of IABC research like the Velvet Ghetto was. But in Groenig’s world, he talked very much about hierarchies and this growth from junior to senior to manager to CCO. But there’s a term that starts to be, it seems to me preferred these days, which is trusted advisor. And the position of a trusted advisor
claimed some independence from internal forces and external forces, posits in a way the PR practitioner and this very Lumanian systems theory in the middle like a membrane, like a gatekeeper, but that is devoid of the internal pressures of the company that would come with the salary and the loyalty that any sort of employment would bring.
What do you make of this? Is calling us trusted advisors taking us away from the challenges that the feminization and associations of emotional labor are bringing? Well, I think it’s an interesting development and I can remember certainly, you know, looking at the roles of PR from the past research.
you know, the advisory role was one of them and the use of the term trusted advisor is a term that practitioners would use. Those I have talked to through my own research use that term trusted advisor. They like to see themselves as people who their clients can go to. They’re the go-to people for PR advice and they earn that trust.
Ana Adi (24:44.872)
over a period of time through the success, you know, the results that they’re gaining and the kind of work they’re doing they know that they can be called upon. But I think when we look at the trusted advisor idea, which I have done in my book, it’s kind of got different connotations. And we look at the management consulting literature, for example, there’s a piece of work that was done in
published in 2009 by Sheila March, who looked at what was called the feminine in management consulting. And she contended that there were two consulting roles. One was called trusted advisor, which from a discourse perspective, which she was using in her work, was very much associated with the feminine.
I’ll explain that in a minute. The second role or the second discourse, let’s say, was around the objective professional. I see these two roles as not necessarily one or the other, it’s what is perhaps a preferred discourse that’s the interesting thing within each profession. What she was arguing in her book that the
trusted advisor which involved the role of relational work, doing the relational work, the emotional work involving a degree of empathy and understanding was very much a kind of feminine discourse but it was being taken over by in management consulting trying, you can see here some,
interesting kind of comparisons, trying to be more taken more seriously, trying to be more you know robust in its kind of predictions perhaps and this objective professional was coming more to the fore as a masculine discourse and that was kind of in contention with this trusted advisor discourse and I think when we start to look at this
Ana Adi (27:09.134)
trusted advisor, we have to interrogate what’s meant by that. And do we have, you know, indeed a similar struggle going on in public relations in perhaps the work that was done by Betica Van Roola some years ago when she, in her very interesting article, I think it was,
Venus or something like that. don’t know. Venus and Mars, it was that kind of idea. I think it was practitioners from Venus, scholars from Mars, and she was trying to say that emotional intelligence was the preferred model of practitioners, whereas scholars were promoting the knowledge model. And I see some comparisons here.
between the work of Marsh and Van Rooler’s observations. So it’s not, I don’t think, strictly an either or, either you have this very emotionally driven, personality driven profession versus a knowledge driven one, which is advising on the basis of best practice and case studies and strategies and so on.
But I do think there is a kind of a struggle there, contention between the two because of the gender related connotations of those roles. So I don’t know whether that makes sense, but I think that there’s something to be said about trusted advisor in public relations. And my view is that
It’s certainly based on my own research. This relates to the role of educating, which a lot of consultants use in their client relations, educating them about PR, what it does, what it can do, particularly the media relations role, probably now, more often nowadays, the social media education that’s required and how you demonstrate that and how you
Ana Adi (29:28.75)
that this can be a course of action, a good course of action for the client. So educating and empathizing in my view are very much related to the trusted advisor role. Now whether that’s considered by practitioners to be feminine relational practice, I don’t know but it seems to me that the sorts of discourses that go along with that role are feminine
and the masculine ones are very much around, results, return on investment, know, the hard, know, the hard evidence of something working. Whereas, you know, what we have to do in order to get there, the relational work in order to get to that point is, you know, arguably more feminine in the kind of processes that you use.
sort of to leave it here as it is looking at all these elements of disruption as we’ve seen in the economy with new models social media for instance on the media side of things if we had thought that trusted advisor might be a disruption of the management model
We might just have to look at it in a very different way moving forward. It might just call things in a different way and help, but also perpetuate some of those characteristics of emotional labor as you’ve indicated that we might just really want to shake off. There’s plenty of food for thought from this. Liz, thank you very, very much for joining me today and thank you for your time. You’re welcome.
been a pleasure.
Ana Adi (31:25.086)
week we’ll continue with our insights into research and go all the way to Australia to meet with Dr. Christine Demetrius of Deakin University.
Ana Adi (31:38.894)
We’ll talk about the politics of gender and how they were seen at play in cases of sexual harassment involving Australian PR practitioners.
Ana Adi (31:51.576)
Women in PR is brought to you by Quadriga University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and ProfessionalPodcast.com. To learn more about the show and my guests, do check out the show notes. And if you liked it, by all means share it. If you have comments and suggestions, find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. My biggest thanks go to Miguel Fecke and Regina Carana, my team at ProfessionalPodcast.com. Without them, this podcast wouldn’t be here now.
I am Ana Adi. Thank you for listening.