Diversity: Public Relations Profession

Diversity is usually used to refer to the mix of gender, race and ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, or other aspects of identity across a particular population. Diversity studies address the underrep-resentation of particular populations, the overrep-resentation of others, and the effects these have on their power and experience. In the United States, diversity issues are shaped by the history of the civil rights movement; while historically Black American populations were the focus of research, more recently there has been greater recognition of the discrimination faced by Hispanic and other minority communities. In the United Kingdom, there is a substantial heritage of diversity research in organizations stemming from the 1970s, when equality legislation was introduced. In early research, the tendency was to quantify diversity and examine policies and processes that were resulting in discrimination. As the field has become more sophisticated, more work has been done on the experiences of people from all kinds of minority populations, rather than simply their representation in the workforce. This has contributed to our understanding of why people from minority backgrounds can still be underrepresented even when policy and process ostensibly treat them equally with members of a majority group.

Diversity in public relations has become a concern that exercises the minds of professionals and researchers, becoming more important as minority audiences have become wealthier, representing a [Page 272]valuable target market. This is because professionals tend to be White, middle class, and able bodied— and therefore not representative of the wider population. Professional associations have taken this seriously: in the United States, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) provides diversity resources on its website and from 2006 to 2009 one of the largest global consultancies, Hill & Knowlton, sponsored an annual diversity survey, which was in turn well publicized by industry magazine PRWeek. In the United Kingdom, the two main industry associations, the Chartered Institute for Public Relations and the Public Relations Consultants Association, both initiated diversity working parties in 2011 and continue to express their support for an inclusive profession. The year 2011 also saw the first major survey of the industry that collected data on the ethnic make-up of the profession. Some U.K.-based consultancies have also initiated specific programs to reach out to more diverse candidates. In the United States, Black practitioners have their own National Black Public Relations Society while in the United Kingdom, a networking group has been set up to promote the benefits of cultural diversity in the profession.

Research on diversity in public relations originally followed the pattern of quantifying numbers of minorities, to explore the extent to which the makeup of the professional body encompasses enough variety to adequately address the wide range of audiences addressed by public relations campaigns. This notion of “requisite variety” continues to prompt both quantitative and qualitative work. Quantitative work seeks to establish the scale of the issue and has underpinned calls by academics to increase the number of practitioners from minority backgrounds. However, it has also been criticized as unrealistic: taken to its extreme, the principle of requisite variety—to match the public relations professionals in an organization with the range of audiences it is trying to target—is impossible to achieve. It is also essentialist, in that it reifies specific aspects of identity (e.g., race, sexuality) while ignoring the ways in which other aspects also shape behavior, attitudes, and values (e.g., class, professional background, gender).

...