Minorities in Public Relations

In recent decades, organizations have been urged to recruit minorities and those who are sensitive to cultural diversity. According to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), more minorities hold professional jobs in private and government arenas than ever before. However, numbers of minority public relations practitioners still lag significantly behind those of Anglo practitioners. Ironically, many perceive that minority groups are doing especially well due to federal legislation. But in reality, anti–affirmative action sentiments continue to gain momentum.

Anglo males dominate senior-level management in the United States, and organizational theorists suggest that management culture is shaped by a Eurocentric, patriarchal bias that becomes normalized. For example, much of our trade literature and public relations research similarly contextualizes the status of “minorities” and “women.” Perhaps this is because Anglo males once dominated the field. The terms minorities and ethnicities, as used here, refer to non-Anglos of both genders. Ethnicity is socially defined, based on cultural, psychological, or biological characteristics. The U.S. Bureau of the Census categorizes major race groups as Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Native American.

Back in the early 1980s, M. J. Layton (1980) wrote of one early critic of “minority issues” in public relations who called the field “the last of the lily-white professions” (p. 64). Two decades later, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that the public relations industry remains predominantly white (89.4 percent), followed by 4.5 percent black, 2.8 percent Hispanic, and 2.1 percent Asian. The trade publication Public Relations Quarterly also reports that very few Arab Americans and Native Americans work in public relations. Opportunities for minorities seemed boundless 20 years ago, when an estimated 4,000 of the 70,000 U.S. practitioners were minorities. Yet African American practitioners dropped from 7 percent to 6 percent by the 1990s even though the number of total practitioners had grown to 150,000.

Further underscoring this gap are comparative salary, status, and higher-education figures. According to PR Week's 2002 Salary Survey, ethnic minorities are paid “considerably less” than their white counterparts, on average: blacks 36 percent less, Hispanics 31 percent less, and Asians 9 percent less. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in 1999 that among public relations managers, the mean annual wage is $56,770. White women's weekly earnings are 37.4 percent higher than those of Hispanic women—and women generally earn a little more than half (63 percent) as much as men. This means that Anglo males significantly out-earn all other demographic groups.

In terms of status, a culturally diverse seniorlevel management is an anomaly in the United States, particularly in the public relations industry. Numbers of minorities working in senior public relations management are dismally low. Hispanics comprise only 4.2 percent of managers in marketing, advertising, and public relations. Overall, statistics fail to correlate with the ethnic diversity of the larger U.S. population—82.2 percent white, 12.8 percent black, 11.8 percent Hispanic, and 4.1 percent Asian.

Even though level of education frequently has been invoked as a rationale for low numbers of minorities working in public relations, PR Week survey findings suggested that 29 percent of black and Asian respondents had earned graduate degrees—compared with 24 percent of whites surveyed. Thus, it seems that ethnic minorities in the United States are outnumbered and underrepresented in public relations management in spite of graduate degrees.

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