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DEBUT PAPER
Working the Second Shift:
Work-Life Balance among Male Public Relations Practitioners in Philadelphia
Nathan Wilson
Temple University Undergraduate Student
104 South Main Street Yardley PA, 19067
(215)-584-7553
tuc47863@temple.edu
Faculty Sponsor: Donnalyn Pompper, Ph.D., APR
Associate Professor, Temple University, dpompper@temple.edu
I am willing to present this paper as a competitive paper presentation, a competitive poster presentation, or both.
In submitting the attached paper or proposal, I recognize that this submission is considered a professional
responsibility. If this submission is accepted and programmed, I agree to register for the 2015 ECA Convention, pay
fees, and present in Philadelphia. I understand that presenters with last minute emergencies must make arrangements
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Working the Second Shift:
Work-Life Balance among Male Public Relations Practitioners in Philadelphia
Abstract
This pilot study was designed to collect perceptions of five male public relations (PR)
practitioners who work at balancing responsibilities associated with family and career; the first
shift at the office and the second shift at home. Preliminary findings suggested five key themes
to emerge among interview data. First, male PR practitioners experience difficulty in leaving
work back at the office due to the nature of the PR field and must become master schedule
planners. Second, male PR practitioners and their spouses/significant others seem to have the
greatest difficulty in working the first shift when a small child at home is sick. Third, male PR
practitioners strategically ask for advance permission of spouses/significant others and children
to continue working the first shift when they come home. Fourth, while technological
developments (e.g., email, social media) enable PR practitioners to flexibly negotiate the
public/private sphere, technology also can get in the way of relaxing at home with the family.
Finally, male PR practitioners secure high cooperation levels among superiors and co-workers
when they must leave the office to attend to family matters.
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Introduction
The purpose of this study was to discover if men report experiencing challenges in balancing a
PR career with a family life at home. Of particular interest is men’s interpretations of devoting
long hours necessary to be a full time public relations practitioner while maintaining a healthy
relationship with their spouse/significant other and being a present, caring father to their
children.
Public relations work requires longer hours than ever before due to the Internet and social
media (Wright & Hinson, 2009); tools that enable practitioners to maintain contact with news but
also could interfere with after-work activities. PR people find themselves either working past
regular business hours to react to a news story or frantically texting, calling, or emailing on their
phone in a time of crisis while out with family or simply trying to relax at home. Meeting with
clients before and after business hours and attending special events on the weekends and during
evenings is a regular occurrence for PR practitioners. Careercast.com releases a list of the most
stressful jobs in American every year. This year, public relations ranked sixth, with enlisted
military personnel ranking first and military general ranking second (Kensing, 2014). One can
see that this business is not for the faint of heart and has the possibility of directly interfering
with family life after hours, to the point that the profession can force a parent to be physically
and mentally absent from the home sphere.
Literature Review
Gender Focus
Because issues of work-family balance primarily have captured the attention of researchers who
investigate the experiences of women, the realities of working men have attracted significantly
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less scrutiny. Overall, gender is “one of the earliest, and continues to be one of the most basic,
components of self-identity” (Spence, 1984, p. 81). Gender identity as it exists in contemporary
society provides the individual with a basic form to build his or her own individual identity.
Through interviews with working men, this study was designed to fill a significant gap in the
gender roles literature.
PR as a Feminized Field
Among the public relations literature, specifically, female gender roles research has received
significant attention given that the field has become dominated by women. Hence, PR has come
to be known as a “feminized” field since the 1980s (Cline et al., 1986). On the other hand, men
continue to hold the largest number of top-management positions in the U.S. while a female
majority of 70% works below a glass ceiling (PRSA/IABC Salary Survey, 2000), earning less
than men who dominate upper levels (Dozier & Sha, 2010). According to Pompper and Jung
(2013), about two thirds of male PR practitioners surveyed affirmed that public relations has
become a feminized field.
To help explain such disparities and to probe what they might mean, some researchers
have examined representations of gender in PR on film. Lambert and White (2014) found that
women and men were represented equally as public relations practitioners in the movies, not
acknowledging the skewed gender ratio-favoring women, but that women were portrayed as
“the stereotype of the PR bunny as a fun-loving character” (p. 14). Male PR practitioners
concurred that the PR field has become an “old girls club” (Pompper & Jung, 2013, p. 504).
A PR practitioner’s Work Is Never Done
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The work of a PR professional doesn’t end at the end of the business day. Given the 24-hour
news cycle, every hour represents a potential communication opportunity. So, practitioners’
expectations for a home life may be changing. A PR practitioner’s responsibilities have become
much more demanding in recent years due to the proliferation of social media and the Internet
(Wright & Hinson, 2009). Social media has allowed for more direct two-way communications
and thus extends the PR practitioner’s hours (Reitz, 2012). In an online survey of PR
professionals, success in the PR field means placing work as the primary priority in one’s life
and long hours at the office is one way to get to the advancement level that one desires (Jiang &
Shen, 2013). Jiang and Shen (2013) identified a segment of overworked young PR people who
identify as generation Xers (aged 28 to 45) who have someone to take care of at home.
Millennials (aged 16 to 27) do the best job of separating PR work from their personal lives,
perhaps because they do not have any commitments to others when they get home at the end of
the day (Shen & Jiang, 2013).
Men’s Role at Home
Over time, male breadwinners have been socialized to generally expect their spouses/significant
others to take responsibility for child care and domestic chores. In the workplace, men
increasingly see gender disparities (Ely, Stone & Ammerman, 2014). In PR, Hon (1995)
introduced a feminist theory of a gender-dominated workplace to explain the phenomenon –
resolving that the field tends to privilege men (Hon, 1995). Yet, popular media often represent
greater gender parity at home; an issue that has received little attention among public relations
scholars. Hence, this pilot study was designed to begin this important work.
This literature review logically leads to one research question:
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RQ1: How do male public relation practitioners balance work in the public sphere with
home responsibilities in the private sphere?
Method
Research Participants
Five senior-level male PR practitioners working in Philadelphia (all Caucasian) were
interviewed; chosen via a non-random convenience sample (practitioner colleagues of my
directed independent study professor). This technique is acceptable as a preliminary step toward
a larger survey project to be conducted at some future point in order to yield generalizable
findings. Interviewed were male PR practitioners with at least five years of experience; men who
are the father or caretaker of at least one person (e.g., child, partner, in-law, parent or other
extended family member). To protect their identity, respondents are labeled R1-R5. Nine
questions were asked via face-to-face or telephone interviews. Questions probed home and work
life to discover how the two intersect in order to reveal potential conflicts. Respondents
completed a pre-interview questionnaire; a series of probes about demographics and number of
hours worked per week. All procedures and materials were approved by the host university’s
Internal Review Board.
Data Analysis
Once interviews were complete, data were analyzed using a hermeneutic phenomenological
theme analysis performed on transcript data (Van Manen, 1990). First, the author
(Caucasian/White male PR student) carefully scrutinized raw data by reading all transcripts
repeatedly to get a sense of the data. Men’s voices, their perceptions and stories of their
experiences in their own words, constituted the unit of analysis. The beginnings of emergent
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patterns/themes were written on index cards that were then categorized in piles. Last, piles were
scrutinized and labeled according to emergent patterns, or themes.
Findings
Transcripts of the five interviews, lasting four and a half hours, were typed verbatim yielding 28
pages.
RQ1: How do male public relation practitioners balance work in the public sphere with
home responsibilities in the private sphere?
Five themes characterize men’s responses used to answer RQ1: Turning It Off, Illness as
Unexpected Event, Securing Pre-Permission, Technology as Flawed Panacea, and It’s All About
Cooperation.
Turning It Off
The first theme that emerged among men’s voices as they described strategies for balancing
work- and home-life was knowing how and when to “turn it off;” to temporarily stop the intense
focus on career work. R1, a vice president of PR at a Philadelphia sports-entertainment facility
explained: “I think you have to know how to turn it down. You can’t shut it off because in PR
you can’t really shut anything off. You need to know when to take breaks.”
For male PR practitioners interviewed for the current study, there aren’t enough hours in
the day to get everything done. Each respondent stated that he either works weekends, early
mornings, or late nights to complete projects, meet with people, or to attend events. One of the
contributing factors to these long days is the commute to and from work. R2, a PR agency vice
president, described his workday:
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I am generally in the office from about 8:00 to 6:00. Which means my day is 7-7.
When I am leaving home now, it’s dark and I’m getting home it’s dark. So there
is a conflict in the sense that my days are long and one or two nights during the
week I tend to have some kind of work commitment. Whether it’s meeting with a
client or networking or something like that. You’re on call for media relations at
any time. It’s not uncommon to get calls for work outside of the 9-5 time frame or
on weekends . . . [W]hatever it takes to get the job done.
However, R2 explained how he strives to create a line between the home and work:
[My family] is affected in a way that can be negative at times because I feel like
I’m always on. That especially in an agency environment where you have clients
that are waiting for you or need your advice or have a crisis and those don’t pick
the time when they want to come. And so I have defiantly felt the impact and my
wife’s mean glare when I’m on the phone emailing or texting on weekends and at
night.
On the other hand, this advice may not always prove practical. All respondents said one
way or another that they have to devote time to keeping informed of the news and trends in
specific industries to keep up with the demands of their job. R3, a PR/advertising agency director
of PR/communications explained:
[M]y own time tends to be reading the papers, checking out the news online on
my ipad, reading PRSA magazine or newspapers, that kind of stuff. So even if
you don’t have on-call responsibilities, there’s… you need to be in the know and
that takes more than the allotted amount of time or hours you would spend in the
office . . . we are always wired and everything time that thing beeps, you’re just
inclined to go look at it. And sure they can be personal messages but more than
often they are not, they’re work messages that get through.
Illness as Unexpected Event
All respondents shared stories about working hard to advance their careers while juggling family
life at home. A second theme to emerge among transcripts is the risk of illness as an unexpected
event threatening to disrupt work/home schedules and the best-laid plans. For example, small
children (babies through sixth grade), seem to demand the greatest attention when they suddenly
fall ill. Added anxieties associated with early childhood stages which include regular illnesses
was mentioned by three out of the five respondents. R4, chief communications officer at a
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Philadelphia-based university told a story of how illness of his children and the illness of the
grandparents who provide childcare are significant factors in disrupting his work-home balance.
The most common one is illness. I don't mean anything severe. I mean the head
colds, the diarrhea, the hundred degree temperatures that if you have a day care
arrangement that prohibits you from leaving a child in day care, and those things
can become apparent to you when you're trying to get ready to go to work in the
morning, or it develops during the day and you get a call from the day care that
says you got to come pick up your kid. That kind of thing is probably most
frequent. The other is around ... If you're not using an organizational or
institutional day care, but it's a grandparent, something like that, then you have to
factor in when they're not feeling well. All of a sudden your kid is fine, but the
day care provider is not. I would say that's probably with young children the
most common occurrence. That probably goes up through maybe about sixth
grade or so, until most parents are comfortable leaving an ill child … As long as
it’s not a severe illness, home alone. You're probably talking about kids who are
ten years or so that you're dealing with that.
In R3’s case, illness is a contributing factor to family interference with work. He said:
[C]ertainly there are some women that deal with family issues and it’s commonly
accepted to do what you got to do. You know, if you’ve got a family issue, a child
that’s sick, come in late or go home early or whatever, you gotta take care of it. I
couldn’t see myself doing the same thing and I am fortunate, rarely, have I had to
do that. If I am going home for a family related issue it’s usually something that’s
scheduled like, something at my son’s school, you know, something like that,
because my wife can take care of stuff like that. Often times there’s others, you
know, it’s often the working mom who may get called to go back home or comes
in late because of that.
Men’s management level ranking in the workplace seems to factor into decisions made at
home as to which adult will tend to a sick child. For example, R2 and R3 are on the top executive
PR level, so their job takes priority over their wife’s schedule.
Securing Pre-Permission
Interestingly, R1 asks his wife for permission to bring work home, but in a context that isn’t
asking. Rather, he is simply letting her know that he needs to finish a priority task. R1 shared an
anecdote:
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Trying to get a story out or pitching a story or reacting to a story or finishing up
something, you stay at the office late. Call home and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to be
running late. I'm trying to finish up something’, so you don't bring it home with
you. Or you call ahead and say, ‘Hey, when I get home, I'm going to have some
work to do tonight’. You kind of lay the foundation, lay the expectations down.
You don't walk right in the house and say, ‘I got to go upstairs and finish
something. I've got to go do something’. You come in and you say, ‘Hey, let's
spend some family time together. Let's have dinner, but when dinner's over, I'm
going to have to do a few more things’.
Moreover, R1 explained that he uses the same strategy with his children so that they know to
expect Dad to work at home periodically and that he might be unavailable for some school or
extracurricular activities.
Technology as Flawed Panacea
Technology promotes multitasking; considered to be a blessing by respondents interviewed for
the current study. This is because electronic devices and the Internet promote opportunities to
perform job responsibilities while at home and vice versa. Yet, at the same time, sometimes
technology gets in the way and upsets the work-home balance – such as while entertaining
children on weekends or while on vacation. What was found among respondents is that planning
on all fronts is of paramount importance to success at the office and at home. R2 explained:
I try my best to manage those by being open in communication with my team and
my boss and the one nice thing about this field is that a lot of what we do can be
done off site. So, I can make phone calls, I can be on email, I can do work. If I
have a computer or if I have a phone and that I often find myself having to do that
what would be typical work hours. In terms of that, in terms of my career, I think
that I feel at least senior enough to where I’m not necessarily (need to go to every
PR related event).
It’s all about cooperation
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Working parents experience a wide variety of challenges, including varying degrees of support
from bosses and co-workers. R5, assistant director of public relations at a suburban Philadelphia
college, spoke about his relationship with his boss.
[I]t’s kind of a big balancing act, everybody I know collaborates with all of the
events you have to do outside of the office or… event like during the work day if
something comes up, or if it’s something like the honors society, it’s at 2:00 and
you don’t get out until 4:00, it’s usually that balancing act of covering for
someone, it’s kind of like an unwritten rule I guess you could say. It’s for
everybody. For my boss, if we were to have an event on a Saturday, I would do
the first half and he would do the second half of the day. And what shift we would
get would be determined if he has something going on in the morning, then I’ll
take the am shift and he’ll take the evening and vice versa.
Cooperation among co-workers is of utmost importance since many periodically find it necessary
to leave work early for household appointments. The nature of PR work, while time consuming
and demanding, also may accommodate flexibility. R4 told how PR practitioners are trained to
be able to work remotely from anywhere:
I worked with several people who have done that. How do they juggle that? It
takes a lot of planning, to the extent you can plan ahead of time, you either
schedule a day off, or if you have a sympathetic supervisor, the technology makes
it so easy now in this field to work from home that you arrange often to work
from home on a day where you might need to duck out to go to a school play, or
be home so the plumber can come by and fix whatever he needs to fix. Largely a
lot of the juggling now is planning as much as you can, and then either scheduling
time off, or more commonly working from home so that you can attend to those
things.
Conversely, sometimes smoothing over negotiations between work- and home-life in
conjunction with co-workers yields friction. Some employees forget that co-workers have
children who need attention at home. For example, R2, before taking his current position, owned
his own consulting business and described a conflict with a business partner which ended in
disbanding of the partnership:
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I have in a previous situation, when I had a new baby, I had a business partner
who was at a different stage, this person did have children but they were older. I
did go through, you could count on one hand, I mean not a lot, a couple of times
when we would get invited to events that would be after work or for clients that I
would not want to go unless I felt that I needed to go and that there could be some
tension around, ‘Hey you need to come to’ type of thing. So I guess I would, but it
wasn’t an employee employer type of relationship it was my business partner and
I. The clients wanted us to be there and so I could show my respects, but at the
same time my family is very important to me, not that it isn’t for other people, but
that it’s something that I don’t… I’m very judicious now with my time. I also live
outside of the city, outside of work, I try to be with the family when I can.
R3s shared a similar experience with one of his colleagues:
Another vice president often wants to work late. With me. Or isn’t conscious of
time, well after 5:00. And I was in a meeting with him once that began at 3:30, it
was scheduled at 3:30 to 5:00 and we didn’t finish until 20 after 6:00. So by the
time I get to my desk, pack things up, close out any emails that needed to be
addressed, and then got on the road, I didn’t get home until 8:00. But his kids are
older, one is in college, he doesn’t worry about it and yeah, that’s a situation that
often occurs.
Discussion
Overall, the themes revealed among transcripts of interviews with five male PR practitioners in
Philadelphia underscored realities of a never-ending conflict of outside work in the public sphere
bleeding into the physical household of the private sphere. Degrees of management level ranking
in the workplace seem to factor into decisions made at home as to which adult tends to a sick
child. For example, R2 and R3 are on the top executive level of their profession, so their job
takes priority over their wife’s schedule. This finding concurs with Hon’s (1995) feminist theory
of gender roles as applied in PR and Ely, Stone and Ammerman’s (2014) study on women
persistently assuming a primary care giver role.
Based on respondents’ stories, it can be summarized that a successful career in PR and a
successful family life at home has its share of sacrifices, long days, and anxiety over scheduling.
The at-work focus is so intense that co-workers may fail to consider co-workers with
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commitments to their families, resulting in meeting schedule conflicts, and client events being
hosted on a work night or early morning. For example, R1’s voice resembles findings in the
Jiang and Shen (2013) study of survey respondents who said that the key to success in PR is to
place work before family and to spend the most hours possible in the office for maximum
advancement opportunities. Indeed, intensity of the drive for success spills over into the private
sphere. Respondents spoke of turning off the intensity by reminding themselves of home-life
responsibilities. The nature of the public relations profession dictates that these professionals
must work at home even when they are not technically on the business-day clock. They are busy
answering email from clients and reading news to keep up to date for when they walk into the
office the next day.
Primary barriers to successfully negotiating the first and second shift by PR practitioners
include illnesses and other health risks which threaten small children. Similarly, planning
schedules with spouses/significant others and supervisors appears to come second nature to the
PR job. Also, while technology allows for mobile work, it also may to perpetuate the work day
by interrupting the tranquility of life at home. Planning is key, but open communication with
one’s significant other is crucial. Respondents for the current study reported maintaining
constant communication with their spouses/significant others to inform them of work priorities.
This means that multitasking between work and family is a never-ending cycle. Jiang and Shen’s
(2013) findings are confirmed in that all respondents said that their work environments support
and respect their family lives in adjusting their schedules when they need it.
Finally, as with all social science projects, this study includes some limitations. First, the
convenience sample is quite small; only five respondents. Second, these respondents all were
Caucasian/White. Greater diversity in ethnicity, age, religion/faith and other social identity
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dimensions could reveal more nuanced findings. Future study is required to fully understand and
predict the experiences of male PR practitioners in working the second shift. However, this pilot
study has provided interesting findings for future hypothesis testing.
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