Happy International Women's Day!

This edition was already shaped around the women in this community before March 8th arrived, so the timing feels right.

Women make up 70% of the PR workforce. They occupy 36% of its leadership roles. That gap is the whole conversation, and it's one we're committed to having not just today, but every week in this newsletter, in our events, and in the community we're building together.

Inside: an honest look at PR's perception problem, a breakdown of A24's most interesting campaign in years, what Dove's boldest move tells us about where communications is heading, and the skills that actually define great practitioners.

Let's get into it.

With love & intention,
Fatou & The PRGM Post Team

Every edition, we’ll share the articles, essays, and industry reads that have been living in our heads lately

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There is a phrase that gets used casually, usually by people outside the industry, sometimes by people inside it: just PR. As in, it's just communications. Just media relations. Just spin. The word "just" does a lot of work there. It minimizes. It dismisses. And it has followed this industry, and the women who built it, for decades.

This International Women’s Day, we want to sit with that for a moment. Not to relitigate it, but to name it clearly and move forward with our eyes open.

Women make up approximately 70% of the PR workforce in the United States (PRSA). And yet, the Global Women in PR Annual Index 2025, which surveyed over 550 senior female PR professionals worldwide, found that 51% of respondents still work in male-dominated boardrooms. Globally, men occupy 64% of seats at the PR boardroom table. The work itself is feminized. The power structures are not.

The pay gap compounds this. Women in PR earn measurably less than their male counterparts; a disparity that, carried over a full career, translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings. And according to the Institute for Public Relations, 41% of women in the industry believe they are promoted more slowly than men at their organizations.

None of this is accidental.

Scholars have documented what they call the "velvet ghetto": the phenomenon by which, as women entered the PR profession in significant numbers beginning in the 1980s, the profession's perceived status and compensation declined alongside their growing presence. Like teaching. Like nursing. Like social work. The pattern is familiar: when women do the work, the work gets devalued. Strategic communications, the kind that saves millions in market value during a crisis, shapes public perception of institutions, and builds the kind of trust that no ad budget can buy, gets dismissed as soft skills.

This is the perception problem. And it isn't only about how people outside our industry see us. It's about the internal logic that gets passed down - the instinct to qualify our own expertise, to accept less, to explain what we do as though it requires defending.

Not more awareness. Awareness is table stakes. What changes this is structural, in how we negotiate, how we build, how we mentor, how we measure our own value. It's in the decision to claim the title of strategist rather than wait for someone to assign it. It's in building spaces, like this one, where the work is taken seriously, the conversations are honest, and the people doing the work are seen.

PR & Comms is not a support function. It is the function. It is how organizations build trust, navigate crisis, shape culture, and show up in the world. The women who do this work, the ones in this community, the ones who've built agencies and in-house teams and independent practices from the ground up, have always known that.

We are in a trust crisis. Not a subtle one, a full, sweeping erosion of confidence in institutions, media, and brands that has been building for years and shows no signs of slowing. Audiences are more skeptical, more sophisticated, and more tired of being sold to than at any point in recent memory. And the brands paying attention are finding that the response isn't louder messaging, it’s more honesty.

Dove's recent "r/eal reviews" campaign is the clearest example of this shift in action. The personal care brand did something most marketing departments would never approve: they handed creative control to Reddit. Specifically, they invited users to review their Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Mask publicly, took the first 50 responses exactly as written, positive, negative, and neutral, and built an entire campaign around them. Unedited. Unfiltered. Including the ones that said the product smelled bad.

The campaign ran across out-of-home, digital, social, and streaming. In New York's Flatiron Plaza, Dove erected oversized installations of the Reddit commentary, printed verbatim on billboards for the city to read. The campaign generated 137 million impressions (MediaPost), but the more telling metric was what people were actually talking about. Not the product. The audacity of leaving the comments intact.

"Everyone is commenting around, 'I can't believe Dove left the comments open,'" said Emily Barfoot, Head of Dove North America Hair and Skincare. "I can't wait to try this. I feel like it's real." (MediaPost)

That last line is everything. I feel like it's real. In a media environment saturated with polished influencer content, perfectly lit testimonials, and brand voices that have been committee-approved within an inch of their lives, the bar for what feels authentic has never been higher, or harder, to clear. Reddit's beauty community has grown significantly in recent years, with views of beauty content up 30% year over year (Marketing Dive), a signal that audiences are actively seeking out unfiltered peer perspectives over brand-controlled narratives.

The Dove campaign isn't just a clever creative execution. It's a strategic signal about where trust actually lives now. It lives in community. In unfiltered feedback. In brands that are confident enough in what they've built to let other people talk about it honestly.

For PR and communications professionals, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is in helping brands find and amplify the genuine community voices that already exist — the Reddit threads, the Discord conversations, the newsletter readers who've been quietly loyal for years. The challenge is in convincing organizations that relinquishing control of the narrative isn't a risk. It's the strategy.

The brands winning the trust economy right now aren't the ones with the most polished messaging. They're the ones willing to be seen: imperfections and all. The communications professionals helping them get there are doing some of the most important work in the industry.

Muck Rack launched AI Visibility Badges last week, a new feature that shows which journalists and media outlets are most frequently cited in AI-generated answers, visible directly within existing research and pitching workflows. Teams can now factor AI visibility into media list building in real time.

The context matters. According to Muck Rack's own research, 76% of PR professionals are already using generative AI in their work, but there is only a 2% overlap between the journalists PR teams are pitching and the sources AI systems actually cite. That gap is enormous. It means that most outreach strategies running today are almost entirely disconnected from how AI-driven discovery actually works.

This isn't just a tool update. It's a signal that earned media strategy needs to ask a new question: not just "will a journalist cover this?" but "will this placement make us visible in AI-generated answers?"

This week, we're doing something a little different. Rather than spotlighting one community member, we're turning the lens on three, these are the women who are stepping onto the stage at Women at Work on March 11th.

Kanessa Tixe has spent over two decades at the intersection of PR, global marketing, and talent management, and she started long before most people enter the industry. Beginning her PR and branding work as a teenager, she built a reputation early for tenacity, crossover instinct, and the ability to elevate clients into rooms most can't access. Her career spans City Hall under mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, established firms including Rubenstein PR and Quinn PR, and now TS Collective, where she represents high-profile clients across entertainment and fashion. Her placements span Entertainment Tonight, Variety, and The Tonight Show, with brand collaborations ranging from Mugler and Saint Laurent to Dolce & Gabbana and Macy's. Her client roster includes Maluma, Anok Yai, Canelo Álvarez, and Residente. Kanessa is a strategist who understands that great PR doesn't just tell stories, it builds worlds.

Tiff Knighten founded Brand Curators with a clear mandate: help influential people build, amplify, and monetize their brands. Business Insider named her a Top PR Pro in the Creator Economy. The Diversity Action Alliance recognized her as a 2024 Distinguished Communicator of Color. A graduate of Seton Hall University with a degree in Public Relations and Journalism, she has spent her career at the forefront of where influence, identity, and industry intersect, and built an agency that reflects exactly that. She also hosts Main Character Energy, a podcast about personal growth and overcoming imposter syndrome. The title suits her.

Melody Serafino co-founded No. 29 Communications with a belief that the best PR work and the most important work don't have to be separate things. Over a 20+ year career, she has written for major publications and overseen media relations for established brands, nonprofits, startups, artists, and filmmakers. No. 29's client roster includes TED, VEJA, and the UN — and the agency has earned a spot on The PR Net 100 list for five consecutive years. Melody guest lectures at Parsons School of Design, has taught writing at NYU, and speaks at events around the world on the power of PR and storytelling. She was nominated for a 2023 PRNEWS Top Women in PR Award and has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, PR Week, and more. She is, at her core, a writer who became a strategist — which means she has always understood what it means to tell a good story from both sides of the page.

Three different practices. Three different paths. One shared conviction that the work we do in this industry carries real weight.

We're glad they're part of this community.

Want to be featured in a future Community Corner? Nominate yourself or someone you know at [email protected].

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