Gender Gap: Looking Back & Ahead

Visitors to our discussion are encouraged to keep posting and commenting to this blog through the end of the week. Our scheduled activity ends tonight, Friday, Nov. 19, at midnight. However, we have decided to keep the forum open through the weekend for anyone who still wishes to publish posts or comments. We know many of you have been busy this weekend and were not able to post. Our blog will remain open for viewing indefinitely.

I wanted to thank everyone who participated in this week's leadership forum. The comments, resources, and insights you offered have contributed enormously to our discussion and to our learning experience. Thanks, also, to the many readers who have visited our blog.

Click this link for interesting statistics and my closing thoughts:


Since our forum opened on Monday morning, more than 70 authors and readers have visited our site, many of them future professionals from our Marist Red Foxes PRSSA chapter. Including repeat customers, our blog site has been visited more than 170 times this week, reading through more than 5 pages per visit for a total of nearly 1,000 page views. Most encouraging, action has not been limited to brief "drive by" visits. Authors and readers have spent an average of nearly 10 minutes per visit, which indicates some careful reading.

Special thanks to our "visiting scholar," Dr. Linda Aldoory from the University of Maryland. We acknowledge the contributions you have made to the field of feminist theory in public relations and thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us. Thanks also to Dr. Geoffrey Brackett, Marist's executive vice president, and to our leadership and faculty members from the School of Communication and the Arts. Final thanks go to Sabrina Clark (Marist, '11) and Alexis Murphy (Marist, '12), our Red Foxes PRSSA Chapter president and president-elect, respectively. Your efforts to organize this forum and lead it have been impressive.

Looking back on the week and reflecting on what we can do with the knowledge we take away, I recommend focusing on ways to move beyond thinking and talking about the gender gap issue. After decades of study and talking about this problem, it's time for more tangible action.

I recall from our study this week that Toth (2009)  found that "men and women [in PRSA] ... have perceived gender differences in hiring, salaries, and advancement opportunities.” Unfortunately, white women in Toth's study seemed resigned to being stuck in a Velvet Ghetto and trapped beneath the glass ceilings in their organizations (http://bit.ly/9gYs5w).

From the responses of our PRSSA members this week, future public relations professionals didn't expect to hear this. Not surprising, since Sha and Toth (2004) found that female students may start with the expectation that their salaries will be similar to salaries of men. However, the expectations of men over time “rise higher than those of women, which may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the wage gap increases with greater years of experience” (http://bit.ly/crVuPt). 

Building on the work of Sha and Toth (2004), I believe this week's forum has added "much to the education of future public relations professionals" and it has helped to increase "our understanding of students’ perceptions of work, life, and gender issues in public relations [which] is not only relevant, but even critical, to the survival of our field” (p. 21).

Let's take what we learned this week, increase our understanding, educate others around us, and work to finally shatter the glass ceilings and velvet ghettos that interfere with equality and damage our profession.

Regards,

Mark