I have tackled a few contentious issues on this blog. This one may just top them – fundamentally, do men or women make better PRs?

PR Moment (you know, the one that tackles the meat, veg and cress issues of PR with aplomb) today offered a small smorgasbord of perspectives on whether women make good managers in the PR business. Brave indeed.

Male friends of mine who don’t work in PR often heckle me with allegations that PR is full of glamorous women and I must be “lucky” to work in such a trade. Female friends assume that my work for technology clients mostly involves working with blokes because “it’s geeky”. Wrong on both counts.

Do men or women make the better PRs overall though? At the risk of this sounding like an utter cop-out, I think they’re both equally well suited. It is no more a man’s job than it is a woman’s job (said he whose wife is a PR, so must tread with even more caution than he would otherwise). But there are, in my experience, certain things that women are better at than men in this business, and vice versa:

Women
Better at:
- Organisation of workload (and of others)
- Motivating others
- Developing/mentoring colleagues

Men
Better at:
- Rising above personal disputes or conflicts
- Disconnecting work aspirations from personal life
- Trusting others to deliver rather than micro-managing

Broad conclusion: women are better at the detail, men are more distant emotionally. Not that those traits are necessarily a good thing.

Media relations? The same for everyone: in that everyone flirts with whoever they think might respond well to that, typically with mixed results.

There are more, but I’d better stop there.

Apart from a final thought. There are two discernible categories of men and women in PR who, albeit that they’re often extremely successful at what they do, have a direct impact – both good and bad – on those they work with closely. One is the lethargic man, who is plain lazy, but who will use charm and guile to mask the (fairly obvious) fact that they are not doing very much to contribute. The other is what can best be, though not medically accurately be, described as the mad woman. The bonkers female who, for whatever reason, pulls everyone along in their tailwind of enthusiasm or swats them brusquely aside.

There, I’ve said it now.