Earlier this week I spoke to two graduate level classes in public relations at Iona College. The students were wonderful and had some great questions after my talk.
One thing I thought was a bit unusual was that 90% of the students were women. The professor told me that this ratio isn’t all that uncommon in PR. It got me thinking about market research, and so I did some quick poking around on LinkedIn.
The competitive intelligence information available on LinkedIn is quite amazing by the way. You can identify patterns, i.e. which companies and educational institutions are feeding other companies employees, what is the average age, gender etc. And all this without text mining!
In any case, In regard to gender and PR I did find that indeed it skews heavily female (see chart above). Looking at three of the top PR firms, average ratio of female to male was 35%/65%. Something single college men considering a major may want to take into account 
In terms of Market Research I think industry myth has been that market research skews more female. But by looking at 10 random firms our field looks to be quite balanced (54%male/46%female).
Our clients in CPG seem to skew just slightly more male than we do (57% male/43% female). For kicks I took a look at accounting and management consulting as well, and these tended to skew more male (60% and 68%, respectively).
So, not sure exactly what if anything else this says about Market Research, but I think it’s a good thing 
@TomHCAnderson
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Ray Poynter // Oct 2, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Hi Tom, at the moment I think there is still a bit of an IT skew in LinkedIn members, which probably favours men over women.
When I look at the companies I know, I see more techies and fewer quallies in proportion to what I know the company to employ.
However, I suspect that this bias in LinkedIn will be gone quite soon.
2 Tom H C Anderson // Oct 3, 2009 at 10:25 am
Yes, certainly there is an overall age skew on LinkedIn depending on age. It is skewed more male than female.
On the flip side, Facebook is skewed more female than male
3 Brian LoCicero // Oct 4, 2009 at 11:08 pm
I was amazed when I officially moved from “marketing” to “market research” in 1992 (from client to supplier-side) at how I was surrounded by so many women. What a great thing for a single man at the time!
Proud to say that a fair amount of our “family” of companies have female CEOs to this very day.
I found that the majority of women (early on) were in areas that allowed for more flexible hours (coding, telephone center) which allowed them to be both Mom & worker. But it’s been nice to see that as the years went on and their children got older, that those women continued to rise in the ranks as well.
The client servicing side did tend to be more evenly balanced and probably gave our companies a more “male” image because more men were outward facing to clients, but as time has gone on I feel I’ve learned more from the women in the business than the men.
This is just my perception at frankly the ONE company I’ve worked at for 17+ years. Your mileage may vary
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