Earlier this week I spoke to two graduate level classes in public relations at Iona College. The students were wonderful and had some great questions after my talk.
One thing I thought was a bit unusual was that 90% of the students were women. The professor told me that this ratio isn’t all that uncommon in PR. It got me thinking about market research, and so I did some quick poking around on LinkedIn.
The competitive intelligence information available on LinkedIn is quite amazing by the way. You can identify patterns, i.e., which companies and educational institutions are feeding other companies employees, what is the average age, gender, etc. And all this without text mining!
In any case, in regard to gender and PR, I did find that indeed it skews heavily female (see chart above). Looking at three of the top PR firms, average ratio of female to male was 35%/65%. Something single college men considering a major may want to take into account 
In terms of Market Research I think industry myth has been that market research skews more female. But by looking at 10 random firms our field looks to be quite balanced (54%male/46%female).
Our clients in CPG seem to skew just slightly more male than we do (57% male/43% female). For kicks I took a look at accounting and management consulting as well, and these tended to skew more male (60% and 68%, respectively).
So, not sure exactly what if anything else this says about Market Research, but I think it’s a good thing 
@TomHCAnderson
Link to original postTom H. C. Anderson – Anderson Analytics
