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This paper aims to explore the position of women in the communication management sector in Spain from their own experiences. The study examines female communication and leadership styles, emphasising the cost of leadership in which they are leaders or led.

This study used a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews with 22 women actively working in top companies and agencies: female communication directors, female employees with a female leader and female employees with a male leader. Data were analysed through thematic analysis.

Results show mixed communication and leadership styles. In addition, the high level of self-demand of female communication managers stands out, making it challenging to achieve a work-life balance and the implementation of successful role models.

Exploring the factors of female leadership remains necessary to understand and make their situation in various industries and positions visible. It also helps remove barriers to leadership, guide organisations in addressing gender discrimination issues and develop mechanisms for the internal promotion of female professionals.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study exploring the leadership and communication styles of women in the Spanish Public Relations (PR) and communication management industries. It also highlights the aspects influencing the cost of leadership.

It is well established that greater resilience buffers the negative effects of adverse events and conditions, allowing the affected individual to recover adequately. Resilience is a core trait for public relations practitioners, due to the challenging and pressure-laden nature of their work. However, as an individual-level trait, this phenomenon remains underexplored in the communication field. The purpose of this paper is to examine the dimensionality and measurement invariance of the 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor and Davidson, 2003), evaluate the level of resilience and identify predictors of resilience among Latin American public relations practitioners.

A population of 898 public relations professionals from 18 Latin American countries working on different hierarchical levels, both in communication departments and agencies across the region were surveyed.

CD-RISC global scorings show direct correlations with age, years of experience, type of organization, hierarchy and social media skills. However, education, salary, gender or working in an excellent, successful and influential communication department were not predictors of resilience. Additionally, results provide supporting evidence that the CD-RISC has good psychometric properties and can be used as a reliable and valid tool to assess resilience among Latin American public relations practitioners.

As in any study using self-report measures, the results may have been influenced by participants’ acquiescence and need for social desirability. Greater participation is needed from some countries to allow for a more comprehensive comparative analysis.

Identifying factors that protect against negative outcomes is important for the development of strengths-based approaches that emphasize resilience. Moreover, in predicting the ability to tolerate stress and its negative effects, this study may help in the selection of personnel who will manage tougher job demands.

Research on the concept of resilience has gained substantial momentum over the past decades and has become a multidisciplinary field of research spanning a variety of theoretical and conceptual positions. However, practitioner resilience has not formally addressed in the public relations research, with the sole exception of the qualitative research conducted by Guo and Anderson in 2018 using a critical incident technique approach. This field provides an intriguing context to study resilience because practitioners are regularly engaged in work that may require the ability to “bounce back” from challenging work.

Governments around the world have shown poor capabilities in responding effectively to the COVID-19 health emergency outbreaks. After the declaration of COVID-19 as an international pandemic by the World Health Organization on January 31, 2020, three countries experienced the greatest initial impact in Europe. Sequentially Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were hit by the highest numbers of contagion and death in the first few months in Europe. The aim of this paper is to assess how information channels and sources influenced the public’s evaluation of the three government’s communication response strategies.

An online survey was conducted between March 14 and April 14, 2020, during the first wave of lockdowns and declarations of States of Emergency in the three countries.

Findings show particularities for the different countries, but also similarities in response and reactions of the public in the three scenarios. The response strategy of the UK Government was the most untrusted and criticized by citizens. In contrast, the Italian and Spanish Governments, which both chose to respond with the severest restrictions, attracted more support from citizens, especially in Italy, which was the first to close borders and impose lockdowns for the population.

Despite the national differences in the preference of information channels and sources, overall, an empirical relationship between government communication assessment and media use were found in all the scenarios.

This empirical study has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, findings will add evidence of implications of the Channel Complementary Theory to the field of risk, crisis and emergency communication. The results also provide insights for communication practitioners in the public sector on how forms of information and trust in sources influence the public’s assessment of authorities’ communication.

Implications for theory and empirical research about communication during a health pandemic are identified and discussed.

Citizens engage at a high level and synchronize their use of multiple media and platforms in all the three national scenarios.

Stronger criticism is provided by online media, especially social media and online press in the different national contexts.

Results corroborate that factors related to media choice need to be operationalized for risk and crisis communication research.

When public health depends on people understanding the actions they need to take, the possibility of disobedience is highly dependent on trust.

Compared with Spain and the United Kingdom (UK), trust in government institutions in Italy was stronger and could be explained by the higher use of owned media for information-seeking.

This paper aims to analyse the current literature on women in public relations to establish trends and areas of inquiry in the literature and identify research gaps for future research.

A total of 223 articles have been empirically analysed using thematic analysis to identify trends in the existing literature. The data has been coded and analysed per decade (1982–1989, 1990–1999, 2000–2009, 2010–2019). The articles have been identified by searching major journals in the field of public relations and communications, as well as snowballing from identified articles.

The results show that the majority of academic articles have been produced by using lived experiences of women working in the public relations industry and thus reflect the professional situation of female public relations employees. The results show that the position of women has reached a full circle in four decades of research and returned to the discriminatory work environment. Finally, the results show that a liberal feminist perspective has an advantage in the literature since the majority of works have been produced in the United States; however, there is an increase in authors calling for the use of socialist and radical feminism.

The paper provides a comprehensive literature review of works published in the field. The paper takes an empirical approach to the analysis rather than the descriptive one, which helped in identifying major trends in the research and identified a research gap for future inquiries.