Why Are There More Women Than Men in PR?

Women have dominated public relations by headcount for decades — the Bureau of Labor Statistics has shown PR practitioners running roughly 60% female since the 1990s, and separate industry analysis puts the figure closer to 72%. Yet leadership tells a different story: only about 30% of PR firms have a woman CEO. This is the gap between who does PR and who runs it — and there's real research behind both halves of the story.

The headcount numbers

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women hold around 59% of PR management roles and 63% of PR specialist positions. A separate industry analysis — the Holmes Report's review of 250 PR firms — found that 72% of PR professionals overall are women, though only 30% of firms have a woman CEO. Of that sample, 75 firms had at least one woman in the lead position, and among the 20 largest firms (revenue of $100 million or more), 25% were headed by at least one woman.

Why women dominate the headcount

Several explanations show up consistently in the research and industry commentary:

• Education pipeline. A study by Philip N. Cohen, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland College Park, found that 47% of women and 35% of men working as PR specialists or managers held a degree in a directly relevant field (journalism, English, communications, advertising/PR, business, or mass media). Communications degrees specifically were the most common: 15% of women versus 10% of men.
• Job-market economics. PR has historically offered better pay and stronger growth than adjacent fields like journalism. PR roles have grown at roughly 12% a year in past cycles while journalism roles have contracted at a comparable rate — a dynamic that has pulled talent, including a disproportionate share of women, toward PR careers.
• Cultural and media framing. Decades of media portrayals — from romantic comedies to characters like Samantha Jones in Sex and the City — have shaped PR as an aspirational, glamorous career path, disproportionately marketed to and adopted by women entering college.

Where the leadership gap persists

Despite the headcount numbers, the same 250-firm analysis found meaningful variation in senior representation once you look past the CEO seat:

• Weber Shandwick: 65% female leadership (13 of 20 top positions)
• Havas: 50% (4 of 8)
• FleishmanHillard: 43% (12 of 28)
• Most other major firms: 19%–33%
• Ogilvy: 0% of its top 4 leadership positions, though the firm reported a broader 11-woman management board handling most management-level decisions

Female CEOs who did lead major global firms in this period included Susan Gilchrist at Brunswick Group (the only top-10 global firm with a woman CEO, in charge since 2012 and notable for leading in crisis and financial communications — historically male-dominated specialties), Marian Salzman at Havas PR, Donna Imperato at Cohn & Wolfe, Margery Kraus, founder and later Executive Chairman of APCO Worldwide, Karen van Bergen at Porter Novelli, and Melissa Waggener Zorkin, co-founder of Waggener Edstrom.

The pattern behind the gap

The research doesn't point to a single cause. Women's ability to collaborate, communicate, and build relationships is often cited as well-suited to PR client and media work — but those same skills apply just as directly to journalism, a field where women have not achieved comparable dominance. The stronger explanatory factors are structural: the education pipeline into PR-relevant degrees, and a job market that has rewarded PR with better pay and growth than adjacent communications fields.

What the data is clear on is that the leadership gap is not closing at the same pace as the headcount dominance grew. See our companion piece on the senior women currently running PR agencies, holding companies, and in-house communications teams in 2026 for how that gap looks today.