Women will rule. In public relations, at least.

It’s too early to tell, but it seems women will both lead and dominate the public relations industry. In a decade or two.

From what I read in the Aldoory and Toth study (Journal of Public Relations Research 14:2, 103), the 70% of jobs that women hold currently has to get at least one woman through the highest glass ceiling. The human capital school of thought, while not working at the moment, will provide correct predictions when women receive equal opportunities to develop their portfolios as men. With how many women there are right now, and given that they will be able to give women below them every available opportunity to develop, it should be possible.

This seems to have happened already at Hirons & Co. Women hold almost every job, including most of the highest spots in both their Indianapolis and Bloomington offices. In time (if it hasn’t happened already) they will be able to guarantee those development opportunities and acquire as much human capital as men have.

One question is why the public relations industry has had a lot of success with it. This plays more into the sex segregation perspective mentioned soon after the human capital view. According to Aldoory and Toth’s reckoning of the theory, “employers (men) permit women to enter fields that are no longer of interest to me or because women are assumed to have specific characteristics (stereotypes) that make them better at the tasks” (107). The relevant “stereotype” in this case would be women’s better social skills compared to men.

If this system were built on an ill-founded stereotype, the system in the public relations industry would eventually fall into itself in the lie. From what I’ve seen, however, that isn’t the case. I can’t say all women are like this (or that no men are like this), but I’ve found the majority of women in my life to be very diplomatic and communicative. There are exceptions on both sides, as there always will be; and this pattern found in public relations should be able to spread to other professions, as it likely has. As “[w]omen appear to move into different occupations at differing rates, rather than into all occupations generally” (107), public relations may have been a good profession to move to.