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The foreword to Women's Work in Public Relations discusses the multitude of ways that women experience public relations (PR) work. Each women's experience depends on, for instance, location, culture, the presence (or otherwise) of a union or professional association, the support of colleagues, the practitioner's domestic circumstances and more. There is not just one female experience of PR.

This foreword reviews the chapters in Women's Work in Public Relations and points to the parallels, contradictions, and struggles faced by women working in the little-understood occupation of PR where the everyday work of women is largely invisible. It explains how women working in PR carry out tasks which can at once be necessary, unnecessary, the whim of a client or management, performative, or exploitative – such is the varied and unstructured occupation of PR.

Women face barriers and discrimination at work but past research has not always explained the form that this takes. The foreword notes that much discrimination takes place in plain sight (for instance in terms of erratically applied flexible working policies, unpredictable workloads, or language in professional documents that accepts inequality) and observes that unless we recognise discrimination it's difficult to vocalise opposition to it.

The foreword's discussion of methodology shows that there is no one way to study women working in PR and this book represents a small but rich range of largely qualitative research methodology. It demonstrates that, just as there are many experiences of women in PR, there are also many ways to research them.

Mothers play important roles in their families' lives. When they are high performance athletes, they need specific supports that will enable them to excel in their roles as mother athletes. The feminist qualitative research in this chapter is based on data from two studies drawn from semi-structured interviews with elite female distance runners: 14 in 2013–2014 and 11 in 2021. We address two questions: (1) what are the considerations that elite female distance runners make around planning their pregnancy(ies) and family lives? and (2) how have experiences shifted between athlete interviews in 2013–2014 and a new cohort of athletes in 2021? In order to address these questions, we drew on three complementary theoretical approaches: liberal feminism, radical feminism, and strategic essentialism. Further, we then used thematic analysis and generated three broader themes about elite female distance runners that aligned with both cohorts of athletes. First, athletes are forced to plan/strategize their pregnancies around finances, competitions, contracts, and spousal supports due to the lack of support from athletic governing bodies or corporate sponsors. Second, female athletes who choose to have children experience stress and uncertainty in their athletic careers that their male counterparts do not. Third, elite female athletes are demanding that further change occur to address these inequalities, and participants offered a number of potential solutions to improve supports for these athletes. Although solid progress has been noted in the timeframes of our two cohorts, further commitment from athletic governing bodies and corporate sponsors is needed to work toward gender equity in athletics.

Gender and disability are intimately connected as embodied experiences that young people navigate interactionally. Disabilities scholars have theorized that men and women with chronic health conditions face uniquely gendered challenges. Theories of gender and disability centered on youth continue to gain prominence as the population of children and young adults with chronic health conditions grows. This study draws on data from 22 in-depth interviews with young adults diagnosed with chronic health conditions in childhood in the United States. Women, men, and gender nonbinary individuals report that doing disability in interactions in childhood meant doing gender in expected feminine ways. Specifically, interviewees described increased empathy, a deep understanding of their own emotions, and the ability to use adversity to connect with and benefit others as expectations. Interviewees employed or resisted doing gender in ways that reflected individuals' gender locations. Women and nonbinary individuals saw feminine performance as a sign of weakness, often resisting demonstrating it in interactions. On the other hand, feminine performance reportedly impacted men in the sample in positive ways. This study takes a life course approach to illuminate how the ableist expectations expressed to disabled children are gendered and impact how disabled young adults negotiate an ableist world.

Sustaining a spinal cord injury (SCI) at any point in time is life-altering – physically, emotionally, and financially – for all persons affected by the injury, but it can place unique challenges on younger married couples. This study examines the transition to injury for 18 couples (ages 21–55). Data were collected using individual interviews with each partner at three time points following injury and observation in the rehabilitation setting (Creekview). This resulted in 96 individual interviews and 300 hours of observation. Using the life course perspective as a guiding theoretical framework and thematic analysis, I examined how the healthcare institution influenced the couples' relationship during their rehabilitation stay and the subsequent transition home. Creekview staff and couples accepted and reinforced the dominant cultural narrative that women are natural caregivers, but larger social structures of class, gender, and the division of paid and unpaid labor worked together to push some women into caregiving faster or prevented other women from engaging in caregiving. This study examines how younger couples move through the caregiving career during an off-time transition when the expected outcome is not long-term care placement or death. This study identified three main types of caregivers, each with their own path of caregiving – naturalized, constrained, and resistant caregivers. Overall, the transition to injury is complex and this study highlights some of the ways the marital relationship is affected by a nonnormative, unexpected transition.

Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic condition with variable physical, cognitive, and quality of life impacts. Little research has investigated how MS outcomes vary by social identity (race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, and nationality) and social location (place within systems of power and privilege). However, emerging evidence points to racial and ethnic group disparities in MS outcomes. This chapter integrates core concepts from the life course perspective and an intersectional feminist disability framework to interrogate the role of diagnosis pathways in determining differential MS outcomes. MS diagnosis pathways (the time from symptom onset to the point of diagnosis) are a logical place to begin this work given the varying nature of symptom onset and the importance of a quick diagnosis for optimal MS outcomes. Whereas the life course perspective provides a framework for understanding disability transitions and pathways across the life span, an intersectional feminist disability framework centers disability within an axis of overlapping social identities and locations. The combination of both frameworks provides an approach capable of examining how MS disparities and inequities emerge in different contexts over time. The chapter begins with an overview of MS and current knowledge on disparities (mainly racial) in MS prevalence, diagnosis, and outcomes. The chapter proceeds to describe the utility of key concepts of both the life course perspective and intersectional frameworks when researching health disparities. Finally, the chapter ends with a theoretical application of an intersectional feminist disability life course perspective to investigate disparities in MS diagnosis pathways.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.