The PR Industry Needs To Finally Get Serious About Diversity

BY / BURGHARDT TENDERICH, PH.D. ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, USC ANNENBERG CENTER FOR PUBLIC RELATIONS

How many decades has it been since the public relations industry realized it lacked racial diversity? One would think that a lot of progress has been made since the ‘90s, when Black and Latino practitioners were virtually absent from in-house and agency PR teams.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. According to the Arthur Page Society, “compared to U.S. demographics, people of color are under-represented in the public relations profession. Whites make up 76.5 percent of the population, 2019 Census data show, but 83.6 percent of public relations specialists, reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the same year.” The report continues: “Regarding people of color, the latest Census figures show Latinos at 15.9 percent, Blacks at 13.4 percent, and Asians at 5.9 percent. However, for public relations specialists, the numbers show 13.6 percent Hispanics or Latinos, 9.9 percent Blacks, and 5.8 percent Asians.” In addition, the major public relations hubs like New York, Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, are significantly more diverse than the United States on average.

The lack of representation is even more pronounced among PR agencies, compared to their in-house peer organizations. This was evident when in 2022, the inaugural Google/PRWeek Changemakers program was launched to recognize PR agencies that are moving the needle on diversity, equity and inclusion. In September, PRWeek announced that its Changemakers Advisory Board1 unanimously decided that “none met the high and holistic standards our arbiters sought to name an agency a true Changemaker.”

According to PRWeek, 44 percent of the participating agencies “saw their hiring of diverse talent dip between 2021 and 2022,” which is surprising given the elevated public discussion about racism and racial injustice in the United States since 2020.

Anecdotally, agency executives continue to refer to the difficulties their organizations face identifying suitable diverse candidates.

Burghardt Tenderich, Ph.D., is Associate Director of the USC Annenberg Center for PR. He is a professor of professional practice at USC Annenberg, and has over 20 years of experience in marketing and communication in the information technology and Internet industries.

If most people in your professional network are not diverse, odds are you will continue to hire people who look like you.

But shrugging it off with the one-liner “there is no pipeline of diverse talent” simply means these executives aren’t trying hard enough. They would best advised to broaden their talent search beyond the usual sources. If most people in your professional network are not diverse, odds are you will continue to hire people who look like you.

Based on the limited data available to us at USC Annenberg’s Public Relations and Advertising program, minority candidates have significant interest in this industry. The domestic students in our most recently admitted Master of Arts class self-identify as follows: 32 percent Black, 25 percent Latino, 21 percent White, 17 percent Asian and 5 percent Multi-Ethnic.

However, hiring diverse talent is only one challenge; another one is retaining and growing these individuals. Students and alumni of color frequently tell us that they feel unwelcome in their place of work. They talk about daily struggles with microaggressions against them. Take the case of one of our top performing Master students of all time, a Latina who had successfully competed for one of the most prestigious named internships at a large PR agency, only to find that she was mostly excluded from key meetings, never introduced to the client, and largely assigned administrative work. She reported that she worked in an all-white environment where most colleagues thought she was the cleaning lady. Another example is a Black alumna who upon her promotion at her agency was transferred into a new client team, where she was immediately put on a sixty-day performance plan without prior warning. These are just two egregious examples of many.

For PR agencies, diversity is not a niceto-have, but a business imperative, in a day and age in which corporate America increasingly demands representation in their agency teams. Management needs to work harder to establish a welcoming and inclusive work environment, while structuring their human resources teams to meet the challenge of hiring, retaining and growing diverse talent. ▪