What Does It Cost A Woman In PR To Speak Up?
(MENAFN- PRovoke)
If the person harassing you at work is also the person who decides whether you get promoted, what exactly are you being asked to risk when someone tells you to report it?
That's the question I kept coming back to as I read this year's Global Women in PR Annual Index. Of the 487 women who took part in the global survey, 55% said they had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour at work at some point in their careers. Among those women, just 36% had reported it to their employer, down from 47% in last year's survey.
Bosses were the people most often named as responsible, cited by 67% of those who had experienced it. And among women who stayed silent, the most common reason, cited by 42%, was fear of what speaking up might do to their careers.
The report is published in a very headline-grabbing week for stories about harassment and inappropriate behaviour at work. On Monday, Russell Brand was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault; a separate BBC review last year heard from people who had worked with him and felt unable to raise concerns about his behaviour, because they believed he had enough influence to get his way.
Similarly, the allegations against David Walliams published this week by ITV News and the Guardian also include accounts from people who worked with him, with allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour at Britain's Got Talent and his former publisher, HarperCollins. Walliams denies all allegations of wrongdoing.
Those workplace accounts raise a question for anyone who manages people around a "star". What do you do when taking a complaint seriously means upsetting someone the team has spent years keeping happy?
PR has its own versions of "the talent". It might be the founder whose name is on the door, the practice head who brings in half the new business, or the client whose account keeps a whole team employed. Imagine being the manager who hears a complaint about one of them. You know exactly what it might cost the business to act. How much thought do you give to what it might cost the woman who came to you if you decide it's easier to move her off the account?
I've been writing about PR since 1999 and I've heard thousands of brilliant practitioners give plenty of good advice about what happens when an organisation values the wrong relationships, but what happens when we turn our scrutiny of other industries on our own?
We spend our working lives in comms managing reputation and asking organisations whether they have earned the trust they want people to place in them. Here is a fairly brutal test of whether we have earned ours. When women in our own industry weigh up whether to tell their employer what happened, what have we given them reason to expect?
The Person You're Asked to Trust
According to the GWPR research, the drop in reporting harassment was particularly sharp in-house. Among in-house respondents who had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour, 36% said they had reported it to their employer, down from 54% last year. The agency figure was broadly steady, at 38% compared with 37%. And across the survey, just 52% of respondents said their employer had policies or training to deal with harassment or inappropriate behaviour, down from 66% two years ago.
Consider how a career in PR actually develops. Someone puts you on the pitch. Someone invites you to the client dinner, puts you forward for a bigger brief or makes the case for your promotion. In a small agency the founder might be the person who signs off your pay rise and the only person with the authority to deal with a complaint about a senior colleague. What happens when the complaint is about the founder? In a small in-house comms team, what happens when the complaint is about the CCO?
The client relationship deserves the same scrutiny. Among agency respondents who had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour, one in five named clients. Imagine being the junior person on a lucrative retainer and having to tell your manager that the client everyone is trying to keep happy has behaved inappropriately towards you. What your manager does in the next five minutes may tell you more about your prospects at that agency than anything you heard in your induction.
There is one encouraging finding. Among women who did report an incident, the proportion who said nothing happened afterwards fell from 38% to 29%. I'd like to know what happened to those women six months later. Were they still on the accounts that mattered to them? Had they been considered for promotion? Did they stay? Employers should be able to answer those questions about their own organisations. They already know how to track who gets promoted, who gets staffed on the work and who leaves.
What Women Come Back To
Harassment and maternity discrimination are distinct experiences, but both bring us to decisions made by people with power over someone else's career, often in conversations the woman affected never gets to hear. That's where I'd look for the connection between the harassment figures and another finding in the GWPR report: three in ten respondents who returned from a career break said they had to come back at a lower level, and just over a quarter said they were paid less than they had expected. Just over half of respondents said their organisation offered no programme for people returning from a break.
Those figures cover career breaks of all kinds. A separate UK survey this year by Pregnant Then Screwed and Women in Data found that 60% of reported instances of pregnancy or maternity related sidelining took place when women returned to work. Think about the decisions behind a word like sidelining. Who takes over a client relationship while you're away? Who decides whether you get it back? Who asks whether you still want to travel or lead a pitch, and who feels entitled to make that call for you?
In an agency, someone can explain away each of those decisions individually. The client is used to the cover arrangement. The pitch team is already in place. There'll be another opportunity. Then comes the performance review, and someone wonders why you've had less exposure to senior clients this year. A woman can come back to the same job title and find that much of the work that would have got her to the next rung of the ladder has quietly gone elsewhere.
By the time a woman sits down for her first appraisal after mat leave, many of the decisions that will shape it have already been made. I'd want to know who decided which clients she'd go back to, what work she'd be given and whether she'd be in the running for a promotion. How much say did she have in any of it? If her manager says she's had less exposure to senior clients this year, I'd ask who decided how much exposure she was going to get.
Who Can Act When It's the Boss?
An agency can have a perfectly clear complaints procedure on paper. Put the founder's name on the complaint and see how clear it is then. Who can look into it independently, and who has the authority to act on what they find? Acas says workers should be able to report harassment without going through their immediate manager. A complaint about a client poses its own test, especially if the manager hearing it is also the person whose job it is to keep the account.
I'd also want to know what happens after the complaint is closed. The agency can get back to business. The woman who raised it still has to go to work there. When the next big pitch comes in, is she still in the room? If she's moved off an account, whose decision was it, and what work did she get in its place? I'd ask the same questions about the work and opportunities a woman comes back to after maternity leave. Those decisions tell us a great deal about whose career the business is willing to protect.
The figures in this year's GWPR Index tell us that women in PR are already doing a careful calculation about what speaking up might cost them. The people with the power to change that calculation should be able to answer two questions: who can a woman go to when her complaint is about the person who runs the agency or the in-house comms team? And who will still be paying attention to what happens to her career six months after she does?
That's the question I kept coming back to as I read this year's Global Women in PR Annual Index. Of the 487 women who took part in the global survey, 55% said they had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour at work at some point in their careers. Among those women, just 36% had reported it to their employer, down from 47% in last year's survey.
Bosses were the people most often named as responsible, cited by 67% of those who had experienced it. And among women who stayed silent, the most common reason, cited by 42%, was fear of what speaking up might do to their careers.
The report is published in a very headline-grabbing week for stories about harassment and inappropriate behaviour at work. On Monday, Russell Brand was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault; a separate BBC review last year heard from people who had worked with him and felt unable to raise concerns about his behaviour, because they believed he had enough influence to get his way.
Similarly, the allegations against David Walliams published this week by ITV News and the Guardian also include accounts from people who worked with him, with allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour at Britain's Got Talent and his former publisher, HarperCollins. Walliams denies all allegations of wrongdoing.
Those workplace accounts raise a question for anyone who manages people around a "star". What do you do when taking a complaint seriously means upsetting someone the team has spent years keeping happy?
PR has its own versions of "the talent". It might be the founder whose name is on the door, the practice head who brings in half the new business, or the client whose account keeps a whole team employed. Imagine being the manager who hears a complaint about one of them. You know exactly what it might cost the business to act. How much thought do you give to what it might cost the woman who came to you if you decide it's easier to move her off the account?
I've been writing about PR since 1999 and I've heard thousands of brilliant practitioners give plenty of good advice about what happens when an organisation values the wrong relationships, but what happens when we turn our scrutiny of other industries on our own?
We spend our working lives in comms managing reputation and asking organisations whether they have earned the trust they want people to place in them. Here is a fairly brutal test of whether we have earned ours. When women in our own industry weigh up whether to tell their employer what happened, what have we given them reason to expect?
The Person You're Asked to Trust
According to the GWPR research, the drop in reporting harassment was particularly sharp in-house. Among in-house respondents who had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour, 36% said they had reported it to their employer, down from 54% last year. The agency figure was broadly steady, at 38% compared with 37%. And across the survey, just 52% of respondents said their employer had policies or training to deal with harassment or inappropriate behaviour, down from 66% two years ago.
Consider how a career in PR actually develops. Someone puts you on the pitch. Someone invites you to the client dinner, puts you forward for a bigger brief or makes the case for your promotion. In a small agency the founder might be the person who signs off your pay rise and the only person with the authority to deal with a complaint about a senior colleague. What happens when the complaint is about the founder? In a small in-house comms team, what happens when the complaint is about the CCO?
The client relationship deserves the same scrutiny. Among agency respondents who had experienced harassment or inappropriate behaviour, one in five named clients. Imagine being the junior person on a lucrative retainer and having to tell your manager that the client everyone is trying to keep happy has behaved inappropriately towards you. What your manager does in the next five minutes may tell you more about your prospects at that agency than anything you heard in your induction.
There is one encouraging finding. Among women who did report an incident, the proportion who said nothing happened afterwards fell from 38% to 29%. I'd like to know what happened to those women six months later. Were they still on the accounts that mattered to them? Had they been considered for promotion? Did they stay? Employers should be able to answer those questions about their own organisations. They already know how to track who gets promoted, who gets staffed on the work and who leaves.
What Women Come Back To
Harassment and maternity discrimination are distinct experiences, but both bring us to decisions made by people with power over someone else's career, often in conversations the woman affected never gets to hear. That's where I'd look for the connection between the harassment figures and another finding in the GWPR report: three in ten respondents who returned from a career break said they had to come back at a lower level, and just over a quarter said they were paid less than they had expected. Just over half of respondents said their organisation offered no programme for people returning from a break.
Those figures cover career breaks of all kinds. A separate UK survey this year by Pregnant Then Screwed and Women in Data found that 60% of reported instances of pregnancy or maternity related sidelining took place when women returned to work. Think about the decisions behind a word like sidelining. Who takes over a client relationship while you're away? Who decides whether you get it back? Who asks whether you still want to travel or lead a pitch, and who feels entitled to make that call for you?
In an agency, someone can explain away each of those decisions individually. The client is used to the cover arrangement. The pitch team is already in place. There'll be another opportunity. Then comes the performance review, and someone wonders why you've had less exposure to senior clients this year. A woman can come back to the same job title and find that much of the work that would have got her to the next rung of the ladder has quietly gone elsewhere.
By the time a woman sits down for her first appraisal after mat leave, many of the decisions that will shape it have already been made. I'd want to know who decided which clients she'd go back to, what work she'd be given and whether she'd be in the running for a promotion. How much say did she have in any of it? If her manager says she's had less exposure to senior clients this year, I'd ask who decided how much exposure she was going to get.
Who Can Act When It's the Boss?
An agency can have a perfectly clear complaints procedure on paper. Put the founder's name on the complaint and see how clear it is then. Who can look into it independently, and who has the authority to act on what they find? Acas says workers should be able to report harassment without going through their immediate manager. A complaint about a client poses its own test, especially if the manager hearing it is also the person whose job it is to keep the account.
I'd also want to know what happens after the complaint is closed. The agency can get back to business. The woman who raised it still has to go to work there. When the next big pitch comes in, is she still in the room? If she's moved off an account, whose decision was it, and what work did she get in its place? I'd ask the same questions about the work and opportunities a woman comes back to after maternity leave. Those decisions tell us a great deal about whose career the business is willing to protect.
The figures in this year's GWPR Index tell us that women in PR are already doing a careful calculation about what speaking up might cost them. The people with the power to change that calculation should be able to answer two questions: who can a woman go to when her complaint is about the person who runs the agency or the in-house comms team? And who will still be paying attention to what happens to her career six months after she does?
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