In this opinion piece, Vanessa Liell, chair of the Global Women in PR (GWPR) Australia Advisory Board and winner of the B&T Women in Media Glass Ceiling Award 2025, argues the PR industry has spent too long trying to “fix” women, when the real problem lies with leadership accountability. She explains why better policies alone won’t close the gender gap, and why meaningful change depends on how leaders put those policies into practice every day.
For most of my 30-year career in the Australian PR industry, I’ve heard some version of the same explanation: women need to be more confident.
Two-thirds of our industry actually believes that.
What’s strange about our industry is that we are not short on effort.
Most PR employers already have flexible work policies, parental leave, mental health and harassment policies and promotion frameworks.
But women are still leaving the PR industry in droves, and do not make it into senior roles at anything like the rate they enter the industry. It’s only in hindsight do I realise my own trajectory was unusual and the hurdles felt insurmountable at times, for very good reason.
The 2026 Global Women in PR (GWPR) Annual Index survey has just opened, and closes on 24 July. Last year’s results found the majority of the PR industry still believes women are less proactive than men about asking for a promotion. Every year, the same explanation comes back: women need to be more confident.
While boards, CEOs and HR spend a lot of effort on policies, effectiveness comes down to day-to-day management skills, commitment and judgement. Right now too many leaders default to the safest, most rigid interpretation of a policy rather than one that actually gets the right outcome. It takes a lot of hard work, effort and the courage to get an outcome beyond merely box ticking and unfortunately our workplaces don’t champion or create environments that enable this.
And if we push on who’s actually accountable for the outcome of these policies, we will hit the same wall every time.
HR owns the policy, leadership owns the culture, line managers own the day-to-day calls. Ask any one of them who’s accountable for whether women in their organisation progress, and you’ll get some version of “it’s everyone’s responsibility.”
Let me share some typical examples from both in-house and agencies.
Mentoring programs exist however they often run at 7am breakfasts or after 6pm drinks, on top of a full workload, unpaid and un-resourced. I attended and participated in these – however it came on top of a full days work and at the cost of my caring responsibilities at home.
Women get asked to sit on the diversity committee, organise the ESG report, mentor two juniors, speak at the industry panel or host International Women’s Day event.
All in addition to their actual job. Often unpaid and all framed as “great visibility” and “a chance to build your profile” – when it’s free labour that a leader never had to account for in anyone’s workload or KPIs.
Domestic violence, maternity leave and return-to-work policies exist on paper.
What’s usually missing is the training for the manager who actually has to have that conversation, proper cover for the role while someone’s away, and any real plan for what happens to their workload when they’re back.
So a woman comes back to a job that’s been handed to other people, reporting to a manager who wasn’t formally trained on how to bring her back in properly. The policy that was supposed to protect her career doesn’t work in practice.
Flexible work gets approved, but when someone actually takes it up, their in-office visibility reduces. They’re more likely to be seen as less committed or less present, and it can mean missing out on being in the room when the next big client brief comes through.
This isn’t something women just need to manage. GWPR research shows it’s what actually happens to women’s opportunity once flexibility is taken up.
None of this is written down, and the extra emotional or administrative load that often falls to women isn’t formally recognised or tracked. It’s also hard to see who is consistently being asked to take it on, and who isn’t.
Instead, these decisions sit with individual managers and get made again and again, with no real expectation that anyone steps back and accounts for the pattern. While this disadvantages women, it is also a significant economic cost to our industry.
GWPR research shows more women stepping away from public relations altogether, taking their knowledge, skills judgement and experience with them. They go to other industries, start their own businesses or leave the workforce altogether. Confidence was never the barrier. If it were, the data would show some progress by now – instead the top barriers to progression have barely shifted in the last three years of the GWPR Annual Index. In fact, belief that women’s progression in the industry is happening at all has actually gone backwards, from 63 per cent to 60 per cent to 54 per cent.
The Australian PR industry has to change how power, leadership and progression work in practice, or it will keep losing its best women, keep narrowing its own leadership pipeline, and keep undermining its own commercial sustainability. The GWPR Australia Advisory Board was established in 2026 to address exactly this gap – bringing together senior leaders to focus on how leadership, progression and policy actually works in practice, and where accountability sits.
So what does fixing it actually look like?
First, name a senior leader who owns progression outcomes by gender, reviewed the same way you’d review revenue or client retention (ie hard metrics, KPIs, measurable outcomes).
Second, pay women for the extra work you’re asking of them – committee seats, speaking slots, mentoring – or stop asking for it as a favour.
Third, resource return-to-work properly: train the manager, protect the role, plan the re-entry, don’t just grant the leave and hope it works out.
Fourth, track who takes flexible work and what happens to their visibility and promotion rate afterwards, and hold managers accountable for the gap if there is one.
And finally, publish promotion criteria so it’s not a judgement call made differently for every person in the room.
We don’t need another program to help women be more confident. We need leaders who are held to account for what they’re already asking women to do and to pay and resource them to effectively.
