Visibility of women in the communication sector. Analysis of the interviews in Dircomfidencial

Abstract

Both academic literature and industry reports agree that female talent has made a major entrance into the professional field of communication, becoming a majority in specific disciplines such as public relations. However, in the same way, the dilemma remains that this pre-eminence in quantitative terms is not maintained when it comes to the composition of the top management of organizations dedicated to communication.  This situation has been confirmed in journalism (Peña-Fernández et al., 2022), advertising (Alvarado-López y Martín-García, 2020) and public relations (Topić et al., 2020), although the latter has a higher proportion of women in its workforce (Smith, 2006; Tench y Topić, 2017). As Tench (2020) accurately points out, the problem could be found in the lack of power of women professionals within their organizations. This research has set out to analyze the interviews published by the specialized communication media Dircomfidencial from January 2018 to October 2022. The research applied content analysis as a technique because it allows the quantification of the characteristics of a message (Neuendorf, 2017) and has proven its effectiveness in media products (MacNamara, 2018). The variables collected through content analysis were the date of publication of the interview, the gender of the person interviewed (male/female) and the position held. The roles were taxonomized into four categories: CEO, Country or departmental manager, Journalist and Dircom. Moreover, automatic text analysis was applied to the interviews conducted with both male and female communication directors applying the ADELEX Analyser software.

The content analysis has confirmed that in the positions of maximum responsibility most interviewees were men leaving only 28.5% of women interviewed. Worse results were obtained in the category of area or regional manager with only 13.3% of women interviewed. These data confirm, and even worsen, those obtained by the GENDERCOM (Moreno et al., 2018) report according to which there is a glass ceiling that translates into a 7 to 3 ratio between men and women in management positions in communication organizations. On the other hand, it was found that there is no time trend that would suggest an increase in the number of interviews with women. However, a relevant finding was that in the communication management position there was parity in the number of interviews between men and women, indirectly confirming data from the Topcomunicación website. In addition, it could be seen that the importance of the companies in which the communication managers performed their functions were at the same level regardless of whether they were men or women. Specifically, the female directors interviewed worked in two IBEX 35 companies, one in the French CAC 40 and one in the NIKKEI 225. In the case of the men, they were communication directors in two IBEX 35 companies and one in the CAC 40. This phenomenon would account not only for the relevant position of women professionals at the top of communication management, but also for their significant visibility. On the other hand, the automatic analysis of texts showed differences between genders with respect to the content of the interviews with communication directors. The concepts with the greatest presence in the interviews with female communication directors were related to social aspects.  However, in the case of male communication directors, concepts related to the strategic management of the organizations in which they worked appeared in the majority of cases. This result, despite the limitations of the study, opens a new avenue for research into the added value that female communication directors can offer.