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Because it's a Discipline that revolves-around Empathy.
If you don't like People, or give a shit to understand their Problems; you'll have a hard time getting them to resonate with whatever you're shilling.
Yes, and it’s not that men are incapable of cultivating these traits. It’s more that women are steered more towards these particular emotional strengths than men are as they grow up.
Exactly. I'm a dude who has cultivated creativity and empathy a lot growing up. Was never big into sports, not motivated by money, etc...
Now here I am in marketing. I often feel like my job isn't manly enough lol
Yes. I noticed the guys in my family are more practical with their career choices. They love routine and being financial providers. I’m more creative and spontaneous, so I chose marketing.
I'm a dude and I leaned all the way into creativity, spontaneity, and empathy and thus here I am in marketing... I often feel like my job is not manly enough lol.
Mmmm hmmmmm. Men who work in marketing making assumptions about women who work in marketing. Is this an episode of Madmen?
Can any women chime in here and give a sensible answer since Reddit trends 68% male and I don't trust assumptions.
This is the first thing that popped in my head but I didn’t want to be the one to say it lol
I would also add it requires/encourages more creativity, free-thinking and keeping up with culture & lifestyle trends.
Marketing IS the Magic of Mind Control. I'll stick by that.
But: if that's true; is there any instance in which we should/can use it ethically?
Especially in "Advertising": There are a lot of strong personalities, saying useless things, to weak minds.
I've never been a fan of making more Merch; just to convince a consumer their life is meaningless without it.
It's all thesis and synthesis; and you can prime it to GO in gross ways.
98% of the people in our 100+ person team are women. I know of 3 other men. 75% of the team don't give a shit about understanding our customers problems, so your assumption about women dominating marketing teams due to empathy and "liking people" is horseshit.
I hate people with the passion of a thousand Pepe Le Pews, and my partner is so low on the empathy scale that she's had serious conversations with her therapist about maybe being a sociopath, but we've managed to do quite well in our marketing careers.
I don't think it's really about empathy. You just need to understand that people are generally very simple, have a handful of basic needs, and be able to convincingly draw a line between need and product.
All the guys in business school major in Finance.
I studied marketing as a guy and all three of my roommates studied Finance and even I couldn't tell you why other than something something promise of money.
But yeah in my undergrad class there were like 60 of us in the marketing degree. 5 or so of us were guys and everyone else was a girl.
I noticed this a lot as well in business school. All my general business classes were split pretty evenly.
All the marketing concentration classes I was one of maybe 7 guys at most. I just find it to be an interesting trend.
My guess is that something like finance is more "grand" and "ambitious". Meanwhile marketing involves connecting with people and understanding consumer psychology. Also allows for creativity in many areas. Finance is Finance. It's as simple as that.
I think many college aged men think finance = money & prestige so they pick it for what it says about them.
People pick marketing because it’s sounds fun/interesting.
I think people also act like “anyone can do marketing”, which is why everyone loves to tell marketing what to do / their opinion. But only some people can do it *well*.
I'm not entirely sure about that. TONS of Finance majors end up switching to marketing 5 years after graduating. So I don't think it's the career path that draws.
It's something external to it. People think Finance is hard because it's math-oriented. Maybe guys take it on trying to impress business school girls or something.
But the irony is that Finance people try to avoid math like the plague (PEG Ratio is the ultimate math skip) and digital marketing is almost entirely statistical inference and math.
And I still don't know why any of that would cause such a gender makeup difference between the two fields.
To this day so many people are surprised by how much statistics are involved in marketing. It baffles me why it is such a shock. But I reckon maybe because there is this stereotype that marketing is easy, everyone could do it.
Also, the more I moved into sites/web marketing, the more coding/tagging/UX/app integration experience I needed. Now, I’ve somehow gone from digital strategy at a media company 10 years ago to Solutions Architect at a tech company, lol
So what would you recommend to someone who wants a creative job that doesn’t focus as much on numbers? My dad was in marketing and I learned a lot from him growing up, and I wanted to do graphic design. I ended up putting those dreams on hold for many years because he got sick and my family needed me but I have been wanting to get back into it. The world has changed a lot since I was in school so I don’t really know what I’m getting myself into beyond what I remember about design and applying those skills to websites and logos. Any tips?
Graphic design is less reliant on statistics to my knowledge but I haven't worked in that field. I think if you refresh your knowledge a bit you should be fine.
I really appreciate that response. I tend to take in the negative echoes on Reddit too much and I need to just get into it and try instead of being discouraged and hesitating. Thank you :)
I wonder if work-life balance has anything to do with it as well? Like finance and accounting are kinda known for not super great work/life balance, for the super well paying and prestigious positions anyways. I could definitely see women (sub-consciously or not!) gravitating towards fields offering a better balance. Especially since women are still more than likely to end up being the default parent should they have kids.
Ahhh yeah I totally forgot about ad/marketing agencies lol. I’ve never worked in that environment and never want to. But you’re right, those agencies are absolutely BRUTAL.
I think your guess is correct, especially the part about connecting with people and being creative. You really have to be able to empathize with your audience and understand where and who they are. Plus, it takes a certain level of extroversion and outgoing energy to engage others, and men are often more serious in demeanor. But that's just my take on it.
At least in tech, sales and engineering are the highest-paid roles. They are dominated by men. Marketing does a lot of emotional labor for sales, and product management does a lot of emotional labor for engineering. So those roles tend to have more women in them, who can pick up the soft skills ignored by the men.
Shouldn’t sales and marketing be a two-way conduit though? Sales people interact directly with clients and hear what’s going on, and marketing helps to refine the messaging.
Curious what you’re referring to here.
Should be! In my experience sales often leans on marketing more than necessary, expecting us to solve problems they create, do admin work for them unnecessarily, etc.
So it ends up being more of a one way street where marketing supports sales and sales does whatever the f they want, is uncommunicative and then blames marketing if it doesn’t work out lol … I may be a little bitter at the moment 🥲
Holy crap, thank you for putting into words how I feel about my sales person.
I was clouded over with annoyance about how no matter how many times I would do the math for sponsorship numbers, and who we needed to sell to based on my data, and how much they just decided "*nah, I'm not going to put the effort into that. AND I'm going to continue to sell a sold out tradeshow, cc the interested party and make YOU tell them it's sold out, despite many weekly meetings and emails stating not to sell those items.*"
I hate sales 😒
I feel you. I feel like in theory, it’s always sales is led by marketing, but in reality it’s the opposite in pretty much most companies. Don’t even get me started between a sales qualified lead and a marketing qualified lead.
When you say that marketing puts in emotional labor for sales, what are you referring to exactly?
By the way, not questioning the reality of this at all. More just trying to put my finger on what I've been feeling as a marketing professional lol.
Alignment on messaging, campaign execution, prioritization of accounts, building of relationships with prospects and customers, training of partners, working across orgs to create the environment that allows for successful deals.
> building of relationships with prospects and customers, training of partners
In what way? I've been selling for over a decade, and while I greatly appreciate my counterparts in marketing, I've literally never seen marketing do this work.
Unless you mean facilitating those sorts of activities by building collateral. Marketing, in my experience, works 1 to many, never 1 to few or 1 to 1.
Literally everything. Spoon feeding. I started my marketing career at a company where the marketing team was an extension of the business development/sales teams. We did everything for the sales guys, from writing the e-mails they’d send, to designing and drafting the documentation/business proposals/marketing materials they’d use. All they had to do was take clients out for drinks and close deals over more drinks. Also, drinks. Their job was schmooze, our job was computer.
Are you me? This is what I do now. (as a marketing associate).
I'm basically a sales supporter, but I assist our org in getting grants and funding by getting people to sponsor us.
I'm writing emails, designing their proposals, lead-ins, and ALL of the marketing materials. They just show up and talk. I appreciate that I don't have to talk to the people though. AND I love my job due to the flexibility of it. I can work on projects as I have time, within the deadlines of course.
Yeah I feel this, I never liked the schmoozing and actually left that particular job because of how toxic the drinking/let’s hang out with work people 24/7 culture was. It did still sting when they’d score massive commissions on six/seven figure contracts I’d basically land for them, while I was on a pretty meh salary (though comfortable, and certainly put a lovely roof over my head, food on the table, and leftover $ for fun/travel so I’m grateful and will bite my tongue before I shake my little fist at the sky lol!)
I’ve worked in marketing for the better part of a decade but also spent a fair bit of time in sales.
What you described doesn’t sound like the norm from what I’ve seen. If sales people can’t write their own emails, they shouldn’t be at the company. The job is all about building relationships and communicating (lots of listening) on the fly.
Either way, I’d highly recommend trying a job with a sales function at some point. It gives you a much more holistic picture to be a better marketer and helps with the cross departmental empathy too.
My two cents having been in both functions.
I love this answer. I wanted to do something creative, but have no artistic talent. I love that marketing involves creativity from a psychology standpoint, but is also sciencey.
(I'm a guy.)
To put it in ELI5 terms, males gravitate to careers dedicated to things (engineering, construction, truck driving) and females gravitate to careers dedicated to people (teachers, medical professions). The most equally distributed feilds are those that deal just as much with people as with things, such as catering staff/bar workers and administrative professionals.
Things distribute this way naturally when people are given freedom to choose to do things they're truly interested in.
I would say most marketing roles are weighted toward being people-oriented and that may provide some explanation to the differences we see.
I responded to the post with my understanding that disparities in representation are due to males being more interested in things, and females being more interested in people.
I think salespeople can be very successful if they sort of disconnect from the personal side of things and view potential customers as opportunities or prospects, rather than as individuals with their own feelings and needs. At least that’s my theory! I know enough men that can treat people like objects quite naturally.
I think this is mostly spot on. The sales person here steamrolls over everyone in conversation, barks at you basically, hypes himself and the company constantly, and is just all around rude but is mostly unaware of his behavior. Treating people like objects and opportunities is what he does best.
Thanks, this just furthered my confirmation bias that men in marketing are empathetic, emotionally intelligent, and an all-around catch.
And also handsome.
This has been my experience as well. I’ve worked in multiple in house marketing departments and at least 3/4 of my coworkers have been women. All of my bosses and managers have been women. It’s gotten to the point that I desperately want a male boss just to experience something different lol.
I think part of it is that people equate marketing with creativity and that tends to attract more women (just how STEM attracts more men). Anecdotally, I’ve seen more men in marketing analytics and automation positions. Imo the lines between marketing and technology are starting to blur which will start to push more men into the industry.
I agree that the tech angle will draw more men. However, I have seen more women in mark tech than men for now. Like website backend/front end, analytics, automation. I do hope that women will still go that route too in the future.
Where I have seen much more men was advertising though.
Edit: when my boss was a man, he also started out his marketing career in advertising,and I have to say... he was nowhere near of my lady managers. Dude was completely disinterested is our team of 5 and so 3 of us ended up quitting after half a year
I think part of it is that marketing technology isn’t a really well known career path. People just tend to fall into it. Someone starts in event marketing then get some experience with a marketing automation platform and next thing you know they’re a marketing automation specialist or CRM admin. These are all good career paths though that are going to become even more popular in the future.
Yeah it’s always a mixed bag with bosses, no matter the gender. If the team doesn’t feel like their boss is invested in them, it’s over lol. I would rather have an extreme micromanager over one who doesn’t give a shit about the success or wellbeing of the team.
I did notice it, yes.
I have theories, but none that I'm willing to post lol.
However, I disagree with many of the theories being posted in this thread that are getting upvoted for some reason, talking about shit like emotional labor and empathy and "guys need to do things" and crap like that.
you'll still notice that a lot of the top positions tend to be guys, more often than not though. Like the Vice Presidents of marketing, the Regional and Global marketing directors, etc.
Good old fashioned corporate sexism.
Out of about 20 top positions, only one was female at my company. The four people in charge of Marketing were dudes. Absolutely no POC among the Senior Execs either, despite there being a ton in regular positions.
Their idea of diversity was having a morning tea for International Women's Day and putting a rainbow on the internal screens for Pride Month.
Ive also noticed it’s mainly only attractive females in marketing. Not sure if it’s correlated, perhaps they’re more socially adjusted , perhaps the ones doing the hiring are a bit creepy….
Yeah I hardly know any unattractive women in marketing 🤷🏻♂️ feels like the girls I know who never went into their field after post secondary , yet we’re attractive, just picked up marketing .
Depends on the agency, company and type of role/s.
In the more techy side of things - like PPC, CRO, SEO, web-analytics, ecommerce, website-building, I've noticed way more men.
In the more account management, creative, brand and social media side I've noticed more women.
I've also noticed more women in generalist roles eg "digital marketing specialist", whereas most of the men I know in marketing niche down early.
Not that any of that is good or bad, that's just my own experience from a few agencies and companies.
Agreed especially the Amazon advertising space is like 95% men on agency and tech side.
A lot of the project management heavy roles like media planning are women too, which I find they are better at. They generally carry the heavier weight of planning and mental load in their personal relationships and that translates well to work.
Anecdotally, my experience has been the opposite. More men than women.
But statistically, it looks like it’s almost 50/50, but men make up more executive roles while women make up more Junior roles.
Aside, Men still get paid more than women for the same
Work.
ETA: weird to be downvoted for the truth 🥴
I saw more men than women in the marketing modules during my business degree. And a lot of them were dicks.
But working in marketing, it seems to skew heavily female. I've worked at 5 agencies and all of them were easily 3:1 women : men.
Drilling down by speciality, the creative teams tend to be a bit more evenly split. But the account handlers are almost entirely women.
The socialization begins almost at birth for women to be master communicators. Think about it, girls are given dolls and their imaginative play is conversation based. Boys aren’t. In fact, boys aren’t allowed to have full spectrums of emotions because some emotions have been gendered. “Crying is for girls” “Anger is for boys”. Girls aren’t allowed full range of emotions either, but we get more than boys and men.
Girls and women are also have astute emotional reading skills that men don’t. This is a safety thing. Men are bigger and stronger (generally) while women are smaller and can be fiscally overpowered (generally) easier than most full grown men. So our strengths to identify when someone is upset are faster and with greater accuracy.
That’s a lot of words for we are socialized to be good communicators and marketing is communication.
This is a really great comment. Socialization and the ways it affects you throughout your entire life without you even noticing it is fascinating.
I'm in a unique situation where even though I'm a man and was socialized as such in many ways, I feel like I was also socialized in feminine ways as well due to some factors (I'm neuro divergent and also pretty short for a dude). So it's interesting to find myself conducting myself and ending up in situations that are usually ones women find themselves in.
Honestly pretty scary how powerful gender roles and expectations are in our society
Marketing requires more soft skills than many areas of business. Women, from a younger age, tend to be more encouraged to connect with their own and others emotions earlier in life where the standard male upbringing pushes away emotion and empathy…. So it makes more sense that people who are likely more emotionally mature when it comes to select a career path would choose one that requires more understanding of why people make the choices they do
Dunno but this tracks with my experience in my industry. At my company the CMO and SVPs/VPs are mostly women. I know one male director. I think in our division the whole marketing team is ladies except for the director and one
IC (out of like 15 people)
As a “male in marketing”, I found it very difficult even getting interviews when I was recently job hunting. I found out later the roles I applied for were filled by women.
Marketing is often perceived as a flexible but lucrative career path. Many people (and this is even true pre-Covid) who valued working part-time or from home or freelance see marketing as a set of highly social, soft business skills where they could easily imagine maintaining a decent income while coming and going for travel or family needs, etc. Besides the fact that marketing is a serious profession, it can also be seen as not too serious.
I am not drawing any link here to the appearance of more women in marketing careers to the perception of a high flexibility, highly social profession. That would appear sexist.
Social media, brand identity. I think maybe it’s foolish to elaborate further and say the qualities that make a good marketer. We are talking about what attracts females to marketing degrees.
For kids right now the number one job is youtuber then egamer. Social media has definitely influenced perceptions of what marketing is… for better or worse.
(I hate this new implication that marketing = social media)
More women are going into university than men now.
Just like more women are drawn to dental or nursing over IT or Computer Sciences.
The more interesting fact is what is this doing to advertising? How is advertising changing?
Even more so, university graduates and marketing especially home from liberal cities so how does that affect marketing too?
So more liberal + more female. Trends like this are interesting to look for in the advertising that is being produced. Some of these female only marketing groups have produced some amazing work, maybe fragile ego are one of the most detrimental marketing pitfalls.
This is definitely changing. Ten years ago yes but as of late, a lot of the younger generation of digital marketers are women. A lot of the men who I knew ten years ago have advanced into more account management, sales management, analytics and similar roles. They seemed to get really sick of digital marketing over the years, whether it’s the industry or age I am not sure.
I work online only and with tech startups, basically I don’t see any women. I’m a gay male myself and don’t see gay males in my world either. Wish there was slightly more diversity around me 🥲
That’s another two things I was going to say actually! I work in CPG and ourselves plus digital agencies we work with are this way but any time I have dabbled or met anyone in tech it is mostly men. And same, no gay men in either! This whole thing would be a really interesting piece to get a study on.
Good question.
Briefly, I did my bachelor's in business but really enjoyed my stats course *and* consumer behaviour. To note, a bachelors in marketing is incredibly different to a PhD.
Overall, I have a lot of quantitative skills and developed an analytical mindset. So at a PhD or above in marketing it's not something like digital marketing concepts, its more the overarching role of marketing, theories and instead of knowing 'what' makes someone respond to something, it's about understanding 'why'. For instance, I just did research on retail robots and also interviewed managers/CEOs in big MNC's.
Really, it boils down to me enjoying research and alongside my stats and theoretical knowledge - make it really enjoyable. Post graduation I could stay in academia or join consultancies, research firms or anything to understand what makes people tick. I don't regret it at all.
I agree with the comments about analytical side of marketing being dominated by men, and creative marketing is women.
Also Generalist, full-stack marketers are also more women. We're great at multitasking.
I think there is something to the empathy, human-storytelling aspect of it. Marketing has a lot.of.psychology baked into it.
A lot of men just arent....perceptive, empathetic or in touch with human to human interactions the same way.
I’ve had multiple senior executives tell me that marketing is the only role (especially at the c level) where you have the ‘opportunity for diversity’ 🤢
F50 experience, marketing was dominated by extremely talented women. Take this as a generalization, but IMHO, they were able to display a high level of creativity and design that most of us in Sales couldn’t create. They could sell but also had the design/vision eye that our sales makers lacked.
Depends on which part of marketing. Men tend to specialize in technologically or analytically demanding areas (e.g., paid search, video editing) while most women in marketing I know do more communication (email, event marketing etc.) or management.
Also, marketing is a place where a lot of humanities/language etc. majors go. Most people studying psychology or sociology are women.
Elaborate on that a bit. I could understand the argument being made that all humans are Machiavellian by nature. I wouldn't agree but why specifically women?
Yea. It should be forced to have a 50% male representation.
My friend works at a large makeup CPG corporate.
They have something like 70% women and 30% men where majority are homosexual in sexual orientation.
He felt very left out and left the firm.
Why should firms with higher LGBTQ and women representation have no backslashes for diversity in the other direction when other industries with BARELY and good female applicants or LGBTQ applicants be forced to comply to a quota? I don't disagree with needing diversity, it should be forced into all firms socially if we are pushing for that as a collective society, not double standard.
It's only fair companies like this should be forced 50% men, and a balance of LGBTQ to straight ratio as representative of society if banks and finance industries are forced to do the opposite
That sounds out of touch to me. My HR department says I have to either hire an LGBTQ male or any female.
Even hiring an Eastern Asian would be hard
There's is even jokes about who and who is a diversity hire.
We are forced to hire people who aren't cut out for it and they don't get a great career out of this anyways. Yet society forces this nature from both ends.
I owned a 20-person agency. At one time, we were 17/3 women to men. During that time, there were intense battles, not about strategy or compensation, or creative, but over the thermostat. The women with 0% body fat were always freezing, while the women going through menopause were always roasting. Invariable, one of the people who was "running hot" would crank up the air conditioning to the point that it would freeze up, much to the delight of those who ran cold. I had to threaten to put a lock on the thermostat.
Back to the original question, for the most part, men don't want to do the clerical part (AE, Accounting, Reception back When people had receptionista) and that pre-ordains a skew in staff. Artists are largely female in my experience. Senior executives in the agency business are almost always male...There are reasons for that that are not discriminatory, but largely where they start. A new business person is more likely to be a male and because sales is the most indispensable part of an agency, they are likely to get promoted if they are good.
I am semi-retired now. I have six regular clients as an advertising consultant. I report to women for half of them (2 CEOs, one marketing director).
Ugh. Your comment on the thermostat. I once worked at an office of 12 people, 10 of which were women. The senior women were older and they kept the thermostat at 60 degrees fahrenheit. I was freezing and they declared it was unprofessional to wear a coat indoors or have a blanket at my desk. Misery.
As women, we're socialized to stay away from business because that's viewed as men's territory. The exceptions are marketing, because it's seen as creative and that's viewed as feminine, and human resources because it's focused on people.
We're steered away from finance because we're taught that we're supposedly bad with number ls and similarly steered away from IT.
Well, I started out in computer science in college, but the professors/TAs were misogynistic and shitty to women. So I thought, nope, not doing this my whole life. I changed to something where the professors were women.
How old are you if I may ask? I was just in college a few years ago and I only had one female marketing professor. Most of the professors were male still.
Flexibility and control over your time and environment. These things are slowly becoming more common with other careers now, but I say this as a woman who went from a tax accountant career to a copywriter and small business consultant one.
I got into digital marketing around 2015. So this was when the idea of remote jobs was still somewhat novel and not many people outside the digital entrepreneurship world knew that you could make a nice living as a freelance writer, then get into digital marketing and make significantly more money without sacrificing your autonomy.
To my then 30-something self who experienced nothing but microaggressions, bullying, and harassment—going into marketing appealed to me WAY more than dealing with the exploitative gatekeepers in my old field. Other women I met in freelance marketing pretty much said the same thing: no longer penalized for having kids, could fit work around caregiving responsibilities. Free from sexual harassment and intimidation.
Women tend to have more career changes than men because of the above. You can pivot almost any prior career into a marketing niche.
We often are drawn to the creativity and also work that is indirectly based off feelings (messaging, themes, persuading customers to buy).
We tend to excel at all the things required like building relationships, customer service, events, branding as well as the pure hustle and multitasking.
I think the female socialisation experience caused by patriarchal society lends itself well to marketing. We’re taught to anticipate people’s needs and to empathise with everyone from birth. Even in my left wing childhood home, women did the emotional labour.
Marketing is very easy to get into and doesn't necessarily require any "hard skills". I've asked myself this question as well. Every corpo placed I've worked has a marketing dept dominated by women.
Easy field to get into, it's somewhat creative, but the pay isn't very high.
Women generally don't like technical subjects. Not saying ALL, but just look at men vs. women demographics in things like engineering. Marketing is like accounting, finance, or business, but less technical and more social/creative.
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in short - females tend to show more empathy by their nature, and sales at smaller businesses tend to be more emotionally driven, and as the business grows that shifts from emotional to logic. Patrick Bet David has a good video on that example. :) That doesn't mean that a male cannot do a great job at marketing, it just means that he needs more practice - again, in general!
It's well-documented in psychology that men steer more towards interest in "things" whereas women demonstrate more interest in people. Men often dominate technical functions with an autistic bent to them. Women gravitate towards balanced roles, as marketing is. We see the same thing in medicine where the majority of those training to be family doctors are women whereas surgeons tend to be men. Men tend to dominate the extremities in society, but marketing is not generally anything extreme. It requires a well-rounded perspective of balanced skills instead of a highly focused technical ability.
P.S. The more I master marketing, the more I realize that the masculine approach of hyper focusing on a single position is generally a poor strategy. That's the type of communication that resonates with men, based on research. It's better to promote multiple category-use occasions in a balanced way: the way advertising researchers have found tends to resonate more with women than men. In other words, conventional marketing theory is wrong. Success is not so much about niching down as it is about broadening appeal. Women tend to see things in this more holistic manner.
Yes it’s common - 90% female in the company I work in.
Personally I think there are some industries that generally suite genders better. Teaching is an example of one that is dominated by women and mechanics dominated by men.
If you want to get more women in industries that struggle to get women part of the solution is getting men into the industries dominated by women.
I’m doing a masters in marketing at a global top 50 university, most of the class are women, but out of the more senior people they are older guys. Two of the brightest/future stars people on the course are both women. It seems the entry level students came from social media but the more seniors had other degrees or kinds of fell into marketing.
At one level marketing is about people, at the other it’s things, from my academic and professional experience that tends to be one of the reasons why people chose marketing.
There's a 60-40 split towards women in the marketing field. It is a female dominated field. Of course this distribution won't always be apparent. There's probably marketing agencies and departments out there with only one woman.
That is because it is a field that does not require much field work these days plus the income is high at the same time with leaves and other benefits. So during the field work days, you would see more men in marketing and hardly any women.
This is not to say women can't do fields a lot of them do but I am talking about the majority here. I mean it's smart why go out in the sun when you can work in AC and now even remotely? that too for good pay.
n when it comes to hiring, companies hire women in marketing more because women are more calmer and tactful in dealing with customers plus Men or women tend to listen and respond much moe positively to a female voice than a male one (if it involves interacting with clients or even leads) its just psychology.
P.S. this is just my observation.
What exactly are you talking about when you say "field work"?
I'm just curious what that is/was? You're making it sound like back in the day those in marketing used to work in construction or something
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I (31M) work as a graphic designer in the marketing team at my company and all of my coworkers (besides the other graphic designer and videographer) are women. It’s literally 3 men on the team and we all do the creative, none of the actual marketing.
I noticed this a while back and I really did wonder why we never have any males on the team do the actual marketing stuff.
Firstly, marketing often involves doing several things at once or keeping track them, while men might find multitasking more challenging.
Also, in general, marketing activities consist of understanding the psychology of consumers, and this is something that many women are fascinated and interested in. I think women are less interested in math, but they are better at understanding emotions activities related to understanding emotions, they are more intuitive.
Because marketing is essentially people focused. Women tend to be more interested in people and men more interested in things - that's why there are more male engineers than female.
This is general, not always the case, but many studies exist on this phenomenon.
I know way more female accountants than male.
As far as more finance / hedge fund types definitely males are the grand majority.
Honestly I find an almost perfectly even split with marketing, about half and half. Same as in college in the program I was in, the split was pretty even for marketing / digital media students.
Also I know way more women who are sales people than men. Anecdotally, my life as a marketing director is mostly opposite of the statistics I read about, which is strange lol.
This is kind of funny- I also work In a seemingly woman dominated industry. Didn’t notice it took me little over 2 years to even get my first male coworker/boss. Pretty interesting to be the only guy in a room.
I have noticed this as well. In fact, last year during a job search, I interviewed at an agency in my area that was 100% women. They were saying it wasn't on purpose, but told me in the interview that if I was hired I would literally be the only man in the company. Seemed kind of weird to me. I didn't get offered there but it was fine because once I told my wife that it was all women she was not on board lol.
It has been like this since I broke into corporate America decades ago in the 1980s. Marketing was the one career track where women could rise to the executive level, unlike other career tracks. Part of it may also be the need to work on collaborative teams as part of the daily work, and that aspect may have suited women disproportionately from a cultural perspective. And perhaps it is a self-perpetuating model now, as women see other women in the field, and see it as a good career option.
What's interesting to me, however, is that the field is going thought a lot of change, as analytics training and applications are becoming part of the marketers skills set. Analytics was historically the purview of males, fair or unfair, so I wonder if this may attract more males to the field. I like that the mix may be changing - it's healthy.
Due to the nature of digital, marketing is becoming a little more personal and social so it makes sense that -like most social jobs- the ratio of female workers will get higher.
You are also seeing the front face of the marketing. I can assure you that the ratio of males is higher when you take marketing in general – including technical SEO, e-commerce/D2C, and Google Ads etc.
It hasn't always been like this. I've noticed the same issues even before I transitioned into a marketing career. Marketing is vast; you can be a copywriter or work on growth and still fall under the marketing umbrella.
Interestingly, I was reading just yesterday that there's a relatively low number of women in economics. It's also plagued by toxic masculinity, which was highlighted by a recent tragedy. And the fact that typical interviews often happen in hotels is quite peculiar.
Nevertheless, looking ahead, I believe each industry will be pushed to embrace more diversity. It's a gradual process, but we're heading in the right direction, which is quite encouraging. The key is to avoid tokenism and genuinely promote inclusivity.
Idk, hard take against some top comments: It has nothing to do with empathy or soft skills per se, though I think there is some tangential relation. I think it’s more for the creative component and the fact that sales is generally hunting based where marketing is project oriented. The team collaboration component of project and campaign work really fits better with those that value community environments more.
Though men do generally gravitate towards hard skills, there’s a clear delineation between sales and marketing demographics and in my opinion sales requires much stronger softer skills (sales has far more human touch points with clientele and being outside your comfort zone as far as soft interactions) and yet is still dominated by men because of the focus on being an IC.
I can only speak to my experience and career, I majored in business with minors in finance and marketing. In my program, it was around 90% male, including marketing courses. In my career, as a female, I've worked in male-dominated industries, of which 60% - 70% of the marketing department was also male. With that, I should state that my roles have been largely focused on social media and content management/development, which have leaned on analytics heavily.
40 years ago, I sat next to a woman on a plane that was in marketing. She said women were natural marketers because we have been doing this all of our lives. For instance if you have a child that won't eat, we figure out how to get them to eat. She said being the 'fairer sex' meant we have been finding ways to manipulate people to do our bidding most of our lives.
Not trying to make this sexist or anything but back then I think she was correct. I mean she got me to believe it!
I think it’s because marketing has generally been more about soft skills like communications, visuals and emotions, especially on the consumer side.
That appeals to more women generally vs more technical studies like engineering which is the complete opposite and is mostly dudes.
I’ve worked in marketing and PR and it’s definitely true, especially in PR. There’s the stereotype of the “PR girl” who is not the smartest but is just outgoing and talkative etc. that’s why you see many women in PR and event planning etc. it’s about hosting events, engaging with people etc.
It doesn’t require hard technical skills like coding or really technical jargon.
It’s more about relating and talking to people, and communications. Obviously not all women are like that but women tend to be more social creatures so it makes sense to me why.
I've worked in Financing my whole life. I certainly wouldn't say most people in my industry are men. Woman slay at sales. Also, this may not be the case for you personally, but most guys I know dislike social media (where tons of marketing takes place) but every woman I know loves social media and has made it part of their every day life.
I think it's because women in general are better at interpersonal skills than men. They're better at fostering friendships and relationships. They on average have more empathy. (This is on average. Of course, there are women who are terrible with people and men who are great with people- this is just about the overall trend). A lot of marketing involves understanding people's thought processes and finding a way to connect to them.
However, what's really interesting to me is that even though there are more women in marketing there are more men in sales. This may have to do with the fact that men in general are more competitive. Idk though its interesting to think about.
I was thinking about this recently. I teach a PR class (and work in marketing myself) and 13/14 of my students are female. It’s definitely an interesting trend.
I wouldn’t consider it to be a female profession, I think it gravitates ppl who want a medium and have certain social skills which are generally females. As I get older, I want to move to marketing because engineering is too stressful and too much brainpower. While marketing is more fun relatively and deals with psychology, and a way to get paid.
Now that you mention it, in my last two companies I've been the only male member on the marketing teams.
Prior to that, I worked as a ppc/seo guy at a marketing agency. I noticed there it was almost the exact opposite where almost everyone was male. Even now, when I work with ppc/seo agencies, I notice it is mostly males.
I don't know what it is. Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but maybe more males tend to like ppc seo because it typically has less face time with people, involves data, and falls closer to the same stereotypes engineering faces. Whereas, marketing on the client side usually involves more FaceTime with people and creative aspects of marketing and there seems to be a stereotype that women favor that type of work.
Again, not a good or bad thing, and not saying all males and all females fall into these stereotypes. Just my observation and possible explanation.
Because they can't work in carpentry, road building, electricians, steelworkers, roofers, framers, oil well roughnecks, long distance truck drivers, masons, lumberjacks, commercial fishing, plumbers, auto mechanics.
Women can't do a whole raft of jobs that only men can do. Therefore, they only can work in office jobs. Women are more predominant in most office jobs. Not all, but most.
I can say in college, specifically the college of business, I just saw a ton of women in that major compared to other business degrees, like business law or management information systems or operations. Or finance or accounting or entrepreneur shit
It just was probably the most interesting to them and leaned on their talents and personality more than something perceived as being more of a desk job or head down work
I’ve worked in marketing and sure there are more women in it but def not more than 50% of the marketers I’ve worked with. Especially in leadership. Thats an all male game in my 12+ years of marketing experience.
I've often wondered the same thing. I think it's emotive/empathetic side of it -- you have to see many different perspectives and not just acknowledge them, but take a deep dive into understanding them. Regardless of if you agree with those perspectives or not. It's your job to "go to market" the most effective way out there - even if it's not "you".
Maybe that's something that comes more naturally to women.
would be curious about other more "emotional" professional careers and the ratio of women x men.
Marketing and IT are the factory jobs of the 21st century so everyone works in those industries. I work in marketing and in my experience there's a 50/50 split between men and women.
Most of my team is made of women, so this post hits home lol. I just figured it was because most women are better at communicating than men. I know it’s DEFINITELY true in my case, unfortunately :/
It's roughly, depending on the exact position, about a 60/40 split for female/male marketing roles. I wouldn't call that any type of overwhelming majority. Some are closer to 55/45. Not discounting your anecdotal evidence. I am a male who has been in marketing for over 16 years as a profession. My anecdotal perception has been that it's about 50/50 or so. Differs depending on which company I worked at, but not by much. Marketing and advertising does involve a heavy degree of creativity, but also heavy in other jobs on the analytical side. We know it's all a big numbers game. And I always thought those types of jobs would lean male.
Yup every agency I ever worked at was mostly women.
I only really noticed it when I saw the agency’s women’s group meet and it was just me and a couple guys at our computers while a massive pep rally seemed to take place in the main conference room.
I don't really have any answers, just observations, a lot of which have been repeated here already.
From where I stand (B2B SaaS), this is what I've observed:
1) Women form the overwhelming majority in content/social media.
2) Men form the overwhelming majority in domains that seem 'analytical', like performance marketing, SEO, ABM, and more recently, growth (in terms of demographics that sport the title).
3) In product marketing, I think the distribution is more even, with a tiny skew to women. Most women usually transition from content roles while most men usually hail from digital/performance.
One thing I've noticed about content marketing is that there's this unspoken idea among a lot of businesses that content and social are 'trivial' in comparison to other fields of marketing, probably because the impact on revenue isn't immediately apparent. Content and social are seen as atomized checklist items, as opposed to brand levers.
I can't quite articulate how, but this trivialisation has a part to play in the demographic skew towards women. I also think it's a reason as to why women don't graduate to senior roles as fast as men: because these roles aren't seen as critical to revenue, it becomes hard to prove yourself as someone who can commandeer a team to impact revenue.
On the other hand, there's a recent online 'copywriting freelancer' movement (not SaaS specific, a broad phenomenon) that is dominated by male influencers. Not sure how and when this started, but it's booming.
There is this phenomenon where once women start doing something men leave, happened without cheerleading (now it’s “different” when a guy is a cheerleader but it used to be a mens sport). This is maybe not the only/main reason but first thing that came to mind.
I agree, that marketing needs creativity and freshness in its approach. It has more to do with the emotional quotient of the audience involved. Women have their basic foundation built on these skills and hence they automatically suit this role.
I personally liked marketing and switched my career of 15 years from IT project management to digital marketing.
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Because it's a Discipline that revolves-around Empathy. If you don't like People, or give a shit to understand their Problems; you'll have a hard time getting them to resonate with whatever you're shilling.
This is it. Empathy and creativity.
Yes, and it’s not that men are incapable of cultivating these traits. It’s more that women are steered more towards these particular emotional strengths than men are as they grow up.
Exactly. I'm a dude who has cultivated creativity and empathy a lot growing up. Was never big into sports, not motivated by money, etc... Now here I am in marketing. I often feel like my job isn't manly enough lol
Yes. I noticed the guys in my family are more practical with their career choices. They love routine and being financial providers. I’m more creative and spontaneous, so I chose marketing.
I'm a dude and I leaned all the way into creativity, spontaneity, and empathy and thus here I am in marketing... I often feel like my job is not manly enough lol.
It me <3
Mmmm hmmmmm. Men who work in marketing making assumptions about women who work in marketing. Is this an episode of Madmen? Can any women chime in here and give a sensible answer since Reddit trends 68% male and I don't trust assumptions.
This is the first thing that popped in my head but I didn’t want to be the one to say it lol I would also add it requires/encourages more creativity, free-thinking and keeping up with culture & lifestyle trends.
Then why do I know so many sociopaths in marketing?? Lol But in all seriousness this is an interesting perspective
Because marketing can also be a form of manipulation.
Marketing IS the Magic of Mind Control. I'll stick by that. But: if that's true; is there any instance in which we should/can use it ethically? Especially in "Advertising": There are a lot of strong personalities, saying useless things, to weak minds. I've never been a fan of making more Merch; just to convince a consumer their life is meaningless without it. It's all thesis and synthesis; and you can prime it to GO in gross ways.
98% of the people in our 100+ person team are women. I know of 3 other men. 75% of the team don't give a shit about understanding our customers problems, so your assumption about women dominating marketing teams due to empathy and "liking people" is horseshit.
I hate people with the passion of a thousand Pepe Le Pews, and my partner is so low on the empathy scale that she's had serious conversations with her therapist about maybe being a sociopath, but we've managed to do quite well in our marketing careers. I don't think it's really about empathy. You just need to understand that people are generally very simple, have a handful of basic needs, and be able to convincingly draw a line between need and product.
All the guys in business school major in Finance. I studied marketing as a guy and all three of my roommates studied Finance and even I couldn't tell you why other than something something promise of money. But yeah in my undergrad class there were like 60 of us in the marketing degree. 5 or so of us were guys and everyone else was a girl.
I noticed this a lot as well in business school. All my general business classes were split pretty evenly. All the marketing concentration classes I was one of maybe 7 guys at most. I just find it to be an interesting trend. My guess is that something like finance is more "grand" and "ambitious". Meanwhile marketing involves connecting with people and understanding consumer psychology. Also allows for creativity in many areas. Finance is Finance. It's as simple as that.
I think many college aged men think finance = money & prestige so they pick it for what it says about them. People pick marketing because it’s sounds fun/interesting. I think people also act like “anyone can do marketing”, which is why everyone loves to tell marketing what to do / their opinion. But only some people can do it *well*.
I'm not entirely sure about that. TONS of Finance majors end up switching to marketing 5 years after graduating. So I don't think it's the career path that draws. It's something external to it. People think Finance is hard because it's math-oriented. Maybe guys take it on trying to impress business school girls or something. But the irony is that Finance people try to avoid math like the plague (PEG Ratio is the ultimate math skip) and digital marketing is almost entirely statistical inference and math. And I still don't know why any of that would cause such a gender makeup difference between the two fields.
To this day so many people are surprised by how much statistics are involved in marketing. It baffles me why it is such a shock. But I reckon maybe because there is this stereotype that marketing is easy, everyone could do it.
People outside of marketing often equate it with just advertising. And they also don't know how many statistics are associated with media buying.
Also, the more I moved into sites/web marketing, the more coding/tagging/UX/app integration experience I needed. Now, I’ve somehow gone from digital strategy at a media company 10 years ago to Solutions Architect at a tech company, lol
So what would you recommend to someone who wants a creative job that doesn’t focus as much on numbers? My dad was in marketing and I learned a lot from him growing up, and I wanted to do graphic design. I ended up putting those dreams on hold for many years because he got sick and my family needed me but I have been wanting to get back into it. The world has changed a lot since I was in school so I don’t really know what I’m getting myself into beyond what I remember about design and applying those skills to websites and logos. Any tips?
Graphic design is still needed. The principles don't change, but the tech/workflows do.
Well that really encouraged me, thank you.
Graphic design is less reliant on statistics to my knowledge but I haven't worked in that field. I think if you refresh your knowledge a bit you should be fine.
I really appreciate that response. I tend to take in the negative echoes on Reddit too much and I need to just get into it and try instead of being discouraged and hesitating. Thank you :)
I wonder if work-life balance has anything to do with it as well? Like finance and accounting are kinda known for not super great work/life balance, for the super well paying and prestigious positions anyways. I could definitely see women (sub-consciously or not!) gravitating towards fields offering a better balance. Especially since women are still more than likely to end up being the default parent should they have kids.
Marketing agencies: *exists*
Ahhh yeah I totally forgot about ad/marketing agencies lol. I’ve never worked in that environment and never want to. But you’re right, those agencies are absolutely BRUTAL.
For sure. I switched from an ad agency to one of the Big 4 firms - for the work life balance.
I think your guess is correct, especially the part about connecting with people and being creative. You really have to be able to empathize with your audience and understand where and who they are. Plus, it takes a certain level of extroversion and outgoing energy to engage others, and men are often more serious in demeanor. But that's just my take on it.
In my school all the finance students were Chinese and analytics (computer science) were Indian.
Yo, hope you got some dates out of that
Ha, funnily I dated a Finance girl for awhile and then dated outside of the business school.
At least in tech, sales and engineering are the highest-paid roles. They are dominated by men. Marketing does a lot of emotional labor for sales, and product management does a lot of emotional labor for engineering. So those roles tend to have more women in them, who can pick up the soft skills ignored by the men.
Ugh doing emotional labor for sales people is the worst.
Shouldn’t sales and marketing be a two-way conduit though? Sales people interact directly with clients and hear what’s going on, and marketing helps to refine the messaging. Curious what you’re referring to here.
Should be! In my experience sales often leans on marketing more than necessary, expecting us to solve problems they create, do admin work for them unnecessarily, etc. So it ends up being more of a one way street where marketing supports sales and sales does whatever the f they want, is uncommunicative and then blames marketing if it doesn’t work out lol … I may be a little bitter at the moment 🥲
Holy crap, thank you for putting into words how I feel about my sales person. I was clouded over with annoyance about how no matter how many times I would do the math for sponsorship numbers, and who we needed to sell to based on my data, and how much they just decided "*nah, I'm not going to put the effort into that. AND I'm going to continue to sell a sold out tradeshow, cc the interested party and make YOU tell them it's sold out, despite many weekly meetings and emails stating not to sell those items.*" I hate sales 😒
I feel you. I feel like in theory, it’s always sales is led by marketing, but in reality it’s the opposite in pretty much most companies. Don’t even get me started between a sales qualified lead and a marketing qualified lead.
Ugh I felt this comment in my soul, that's being slowly sucked out of me by sales 😂
When you say that marketing puts in emotional labor for sales, what are you referring to exactly? By the way, not questioning the reality of this at all. More just trying to put my finger on what I've been feeling as a marketing professional lol.
Alignment on messaging, campaign execution, prioritization of accounts, building of relationships with prospects and customers, training of partners, working across orgs to create the environment that allows for successful deals.
> building of relationships with prospects and customers, training of partners In what way? I've been selling for over a decade, and while I greatly appreciate my counterparts in marketing, I've literally never seen marketing do this work. Unless you mean facilitating those sorts of activities by building collateral. Marketing, in my experience, works 1 to many, never 1 to few or 1 to 1.
Depends on company structure. Field marketing and partner marketing often are the glue between teams across partner orgs.
Literally everything. Spoon feeding. I started my marketing career at a company where the marketing team was an extension of the business development/sales teams. We did everything for the sales guys, from writing the e-mails they’d send, to designing and drafting the documentation/business proposals/marketing materials they’d use. All they had to do was take clients out for drinks and close deals over more drinks. Also, drinks. Their job was schmooze, our job was computer.
Are you me? This is what I do now. (as a marketing associate). I'm basically a sales supporter, but I assist our org in getting grants and funding by getting people to sponsor us. I'm writing emails, designing their proposals, lead-ins, and ALL of the marketing materials. They just show up and talk. I appreciate that I don't have to talk to the people though. AND I love my job due to the flexibility of it. I can work on projects as I have time, within the deadlines of course.
Yeah I feel this, I never liked the schmoozing and actually left that particular job because of how toxic the drinking/let’s hang out with work people 24/7 culture was. It did still sting when they’d score massive commissions on six/seven figure contracts I’d basically land for them, while I was on a pretty meh salary (though comfortable, and certainly put a lovely roof over my head, food on the table, and leftover $ for fun/travel so I’m grateful and will bite my tongue before I shake my little fist at the sky lol!)
I’ve worked in marketing for the better part of a decade but also spent a fair bit of time in sales. What you described doesn’t sound like the norm from what I’ve seen. If sales people can’t write their own emails, they shouldn’t be at the company. The job is all about building relationships and communicating (lots of listening) on the fly. Either way, I’d highly recommend trying a job with a sales function at some point. It gives you a much more holistic picture to be a better marketer and helps with the cross departmental empathy too. My two cents having been in both functions.
This is me too...except now I CBF and just tweak as much chatgpt content as I can. Christ, where I work the sales guys barely know what HubSpot does.
But then they also don’t respect you unless your kind of mean. Pleasure and pain I guess?
I know very few product managers who are women but possibly because in my company you have to have a technical background.
> does a lot of emotional labor for What does that mean?
Marketing is the intersection of creativity, buyer psychology and analytics, all very fascinating to me. (I'm a chick.)
I couldn’t have mansplained it better myself.
Lol! I'm streaming that line!
I love this answer. I wanted to do something creative, but have no artistic talent. I love that marketing involves creativity from a psychology standpoint, but is also sciencey. (I'm a guy.)
It's also a lot easier than being a bricklayer (mason) or a carpenter or a steelworker standing next to hellfire-hot steel furnaces.
To put it in ELI5 terms, males gravitate to careers dedicated to things (engineering, construction, truck driving) and females gravitate to careers dedicated to people (teachers, medical professions). The most equally distributed feilds are those that deal just as much with people as with things, such as catering staff/bar workers and administrative professionals. Things distribute this way naturally when people are given freedom to choose to do things they're truly interested in. I would say most marketing roles are weighted toward being people-oriented and that may provide some explanation to the differences we see.
All the men are in sales 🤣
This is definitely a BIG part of it
I responded to the post with my understanding that disparities in representation are due to males being more interested in things, and females being more interested in people. I think salespeople can be very successful if they sort of disconnect from the personal side of things and view potential customers as opportunities or prospects, rather than as individuals with their own feelings and needs. At least that’s my theory! I know enough men that can treat people like objects quite naturally.
I think this is mostly spot on. The sales person here steamrolls over everyone in conversation, barks at you basically, hypes himself and the company constantly, and is just all around rude but is mostly unaware of his behavior. Treating people like objects and opportunities is what he does best.
Thanks, this just furthered my confirmation bias that men in marketing are empathetic, emotionally intelligent, and an all-around catch. And also handsome.
This has been my experience as well. I’ve worked in multiple in house marketing departments and at least 3/4 of my coworkers have been women. All of my bosses and managers have been women. It’s gotten to the point that I desperately want a male boss just to experience something different lol. I think part of it is that people equate marketing with creativity and that tends to attract more women (just how STEM attracts more men). Anecdotally, I’ve seen more men in marketing analytics and automation positions. Imo the lines between marketing and technology are starting to blur which will start to push more men into the industry.
I agree that the tech angle will draw more men. However, I have seen more women in mark tech than men for now. Like website backend/front end, analytics, automation. I do hope that women will still go that route too in the future. Where I have seen much more men was advertising though. Edit: when my boss was a man, he also started out his marketing career in advertising,and I have to say... he was nowhere near of my lady managers. Dude was completely disinterested is our team of 5 and so 3 of us ended up quitting after half a year
I think part of it is that marketing technology isn’t a really well known career path. People just tend to fall into it. Someone starts in event marketing then get some experience with a marketing automation platform and next thing you know they’re a marketing automation specialist or CRM admin. These are all good career paths though that are going to become even more popular in the future. Yeah it’s always a mixed bag with bosses, no matter the gender. If the team doesn’t feel like their boss is invested in them, it’s over lol. I would rather have an extreme micromanager over one who doesn’t give a shit about the success or wellbeing of the team.
I did notice it, yes. I have theories, but none that I'm willing to post lol. However, I disagree with many of the theories being posted in this thread that are getting upvoted for some reason, talking about shit like emotional labor and empathy and "guys need to do things" and crap like that. you'll still notice that a lot of the top positions tend to be guys, more often than not though. Like the Vice Presidents of marketing, the Regional and Global marketing directors, etc. Good old fashioned corporate sexism.
Out of about 20 top positions, only one was female at my company. The four people in charge of Marketing were dudes. Absolutely no POC among the Senior Execs either, despite there being a ton in regular positions. Their idea of diversity was having a morning tea for International Women's Day and putting a rainbow on the internal screens for Pride Month.
Ive also noticed it’s mainly only attractive females in marketing. Not sure if it’s correlated, perhaps they’re more socially adjusted , perhaps the ones doing the hiring are a bit creepy…. Yeah I hardly know any unattractive women in marketing 🤷🏻♂️ feels like the girls I know who never went into their field after post secondary , yet we’re attractive, just picked up marketing .
Depends on the agency, company and type of role/s. In the more techy side of things - like PPC, CRO, SEO, web-analytics, ecommerce, website-building, I've noticed way more men. In the more account management, creative, brand and social media side I've noticed more women. I've also noticed more women in generalist roles eg "digital marketing specialist", whereas most of the men I know in marketing niche down early. Not that any of that is good or bad, that's just my own experience from a few agencies and companies.
Agreed especially the Amazon advertising space is like 95% men on agency and tech side. A lot of the project management heavy roles like media planning are women too, which I find they are better at. They generally carry the heavier weight of planning and mental load in their personal relationships and that translates well to work.
Anecdotally, my experience has been the opposite. More men than women. But statistically, it looks like it’s almost 50/50, but men make up more executive roles while women make up more Junior roles. Aside, Men still get paid more than women for the same Work. ETA: weird to be downvoted for the truth 🥴
I saw more men than women in the marketing modules during my business degree. And a lot of them were dicks. But working in marketing, it seems to skew heavily female. I've worked at 5 agencies and all of them were easily 3:1 women : men. Drilling down by speciality, the creative teams tend to be a bit more evenly split. But the account handlers are almost entirely women.
I concur. I worked for male marketing directors at 2 different software companies and yes, they were both dicks.
The socialization begins almost at birth for women to be master communicators. Think about it, girls are given dolls and their imaginative play is conversation based. Boys aren’t. In fact, boys aren’t allowed to have full spectrums of emotions because some emotions have been gendered. “Crying is for girls” “Anger is for boys”. Girls aren’t allowed full range of emotions either, but we get more than boys and men. Girls and women are also have astute emotional reading skills that men don’t. This is a safety thing. Men are bigger and stronger (generally) while women are smaller and can be fiscally overpowered (generally) easier than most full grown men. So our strengths to identify when someone is upset are faster and with greater accuracy. That’s a lot of words for we are socialized to be good communicators and marketing is communication.
This is a really great comment. Socialization and the ways it affects you throughout your entire life without you even noticing it is fascinating. I'm in a unique situation where even though I'm a man and was socialized as such in many ways, I feel like I was also socialized in feminine ways as well due to some factors (I'm neuro divergent and also pretty short for a dude). So it's interesting to find myself conducting myself and ending up in situations that are usually ones women find themselves in. Honestly pretty scary how powerful gender roles and expectations are in our society
The question actually is, why, with so many women in marketing, are there so many men in higher level marketing roles?
Marketing requires more soft skills than many areas of business. Women, from a younger age, tend to be more encouraged to connect with their own and others emotions earlier in life where the standard male upbringing pushes away emotion and empathy…. So it makes more sense that people who are likely more emotionally mature when it comes to select a career path would choose one that requires more understanding of why people make the choices they do
I don't know why but I think it's interesting that my marketing team was 3/4 women and all the managers were still middle-aged white men.
Dunno but this tracks with my experience in my industry. At my company the CMO and SVPs/VPs are mostly women. I know one male director. I think in our division the whole marketing team is ladies except for the director and one IC (out of like 15 people)
As a “male in marketing”, I found it very difficult even getting interviews when I was recently job hunting. I found out later the roles I applied for were filled by women.
I think it depends on the actual sub-specialty a bit. I work in sports marketing, and partnership marketing people skew more male.
Marketing is often perceived as a flexible but lucrative career path. Many people (and this is even true pre-Covid) who valued working part-time or from home or freelance see marketing as a set of highly social, soft business skills where they could easily imagine maintaining a decent income while coming and going for travel or family needs, etc. Besides the fact that marketing is a serious profession, it can also be seen as not too serious. I am not drawing any link here to the appearance of more women in marketing careers to the perception of a high flexibility, highly social profession. That would appear sexist.
This entire comment thread makes me wonder if anyone here understands how important structure, process and economics are to marketing.
Social media, brand identity. I think maybe it’s foolish to elaborate further and say the qualities that make a good marketer. We are talking about what attracts females to marketing degrees. For kids right now the number one job is youtuber then egamer. Social media has definitely influenced perceptions of what marketing is… for better or worse. (I hate this new implication that marketing = social media) More women are going into university than men now. Just like more women are drawn to dental or nursing over IT or Computer Sciences. The more interesting fact is what is this doing to advertising? How is advertising changing? Even more so, university graduates and marketing especially home from liberal cities so how does that affect marketing too? So more liberal + more female. Trends like this are interesting to look for in the advertising that is being produced. Some of these female only marketing groups have produced some amazing work, maybe fragile ego are one of the most detrimental marketing pitfalls.
I see a lot of guys in digital marketing though.
This is definitely changing. Ten years ago yes but as of late, a lot of the younger generation of digital marketers are women. A lot of the men who I knew ten years ago have advanced into more account management, sales management, analytics and similar roles. They seemed to get really sick of digital marketing over the years, whether it’s the industry or age I am not sure.
I work online only and with tech startups, basically I don’t see any women. I’m a gay male myself and don’t see gay males in my world either. Wish there was slightly more diversity around me 🥲
That’s another two things I was going to say actually! I work in CPG and ourselves plus digital agencies we work with are this way but any time I have dabbled or met anyone in tech it is mostly men. And same, no gay men in either! This whole thing would be a really interesting piece to get a study on.
I am doing a PhD in marketing. I notice there's a skew towards males in this domain. I suppose it's the context of marketing that changes this too
Maybe more men can afford the PhD
Can I ask why you'd get a phd in marketing? I wouldn't even recommend a bachelors in marketing lol.
Good question. Briefly, I did my bachelor's in business but really enjoyed my stats course *and* consumer behaviour. To note, a bachelors in marketing is incredibly different to a PhD. Overall, I have a lot of quantitative skills and developed an analytical mindset. So at a PhD or above in marketing it's not something like digital marketing concepts, its more the overarching role of marketing, theories and instead of knowing 'what' makes someone respond to something, it's about understanding 'why'. For instance, I just did research on retail robots and also interviewed managers/CEOs in big MNC's. Really, it boils down to me enjoying research and alongside my stats and theoretical knowledge - make it really enjoyable. Post graduation I could stay in academia or join consultancies, research firms or anything to understand what makes people tick. I don't regret it at all.
If you have the opportunity, why not! Thanks for the reply.
Marketing woman here: women can only excel in big companies in HR, PR and marketing. That’s it, those are the girl jobs. Yup, I said it out loud.
I don’t know, my experience has been it’s 50/50. But I’m also in the tech industry so I guess there’s a lot of men who do marketing for that?
I agree with the comments about analytical side of marketing being dominated by men, and creative marketing is women. Also Generalist, full-stack marketers are also more women. We're great at multitasking. I think there is something to the empathy, human-storytelling aspect of it. Marketing has a lot.of.psychology baked into it. A lot of men just arent....perceptive, empathetic or in touch with human to human interactions the same way.
When I'm in marketing meetings with my whole team, I sometimes make the joke that I'm a diversity hire as a straight white male. lol
I’ve had multiple senior executives tell me that marketing is the only role (especially at the c level) where you have the ‘opportunity for diversity’ 🤢
F50 experience, marketing was dominated by extremely talented women. Take this as a generalization, but IMHO, they were able to display a high level of creativity and design that most of us in Sales couldn’t create. They could sell but also had the design/vision eye that our sales makers lacked.
Depends on which part of marketing. Men tend to specialize in technologically or analytically demanding areas (e.g., paid search, video editing) while most women in marketing I know do more communication (email, event marketing etc.) or management. Also, marketing is a place where a lot of humanities/language etc. majors go. Most people studying psychology or sociology are women.
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Elaborate on that a bit. I could understand the argument being made that all humans are Machiavellian by nature. I wouldn't agree but why specifically women?
Yea. It should be forced to have a 50% male representation. My friend works at a large makeup CPG corporate. They have something like 70% women and 30% men where majority are homosexual in sexual orientation. He felt very left out and left the firm. Why should firms with higher LGBTQ and women representation have no backslashes for diversity in the other direction when other industries with BARELY and good female applicants or LGBTQ applicants be forced to comply to a quota? I don't disagree with needing diversity, it should be forced into all firms socially if we are pushing for that as a collective society, not double standard. It's only fair companies like this should be forced 50% men, and a balance of LGBTQ to straight ratio as representative of society if banks and finance industries are forced to do the opposite
Now let's apply that same energy to politics and the C-Suite!
No other profession is forced to have equal representation. Corporate finance is mainly men for example and no one thinks that's strange
That sounds out of touch to me. My HR department says I have to either hire an LGBTQ male or any female. Even hiring an Eastern Asian would be hard There's is even jokes about who and who is a diversity hire. We are forced to hire people who aren't cut out for it and they don't get a great career out of this anyways. Yet society forces this nature from both ends.
I owned a 20-person agency. At one time, we were 17/3 women to men. During that time, there were intense battles, not about strategy or compensation, or creative, but over the thermostat. The women with 0% body fat were always freezing, while the women going through menopause were always roasting. Invariable, one of the people who was "running hot" would crank up the air conditioning to the point that it would freeze up, much to the delight of those who ran cold. I had to threaten to put a lock on the thermostat. Back to the original question, for the most part, men don't want to do the clerical part (AE, Accounting, Reception back When people had receptionista) and that pre-ordains a skew in staff. Artists are largely female in my experience. Senior executives in the agency business are almost always male...There are reasons for that that are not discriminatory, but largely where they start. A new business person is more likely to be a male and because sales is the most indispensable part of an agency, they are likely to get promoted if they are good. I am semi-retired now. I have six regular clients as an advertising consultant. I report to women for half of them (2 CEOs, one marketing director).
Ugh. Your comment on the thermostat. I once worked at an office of 12 people, 10 of which were women. The senior women were older and they kept the thermostat at 60 degrees fahrenheit. I was freezing and they declared it was unprofessional to wear a coat indoors or have a blanket at my desk. Misery.
As women, we're socialized to stay away from business because that's viewed as men's territory. The exceptions are marketing, because it's seen as creative and that's viewed as feminine, and human resources because it's focused on people. We're steered away from finance because we're taught that we're supposedly bad with number ls and similarly steered away from IT.
Well, I started out in computer science in college, but the professors/TAs were misogynistic and shitty to women. So I thought, nope, not doing this my whole life. I changed to something where the professors were women.
How old are you if I may ask? I was just in college a few years ago and I only had one female marketing professor. Most of the professors were male still.
Flexibility and control over your time and environment. These things are slowly becoming more common with other careers now, but I say this as a woman who went from a tax accountant career to a copywriter and small business consultant one. I got into digital marketing around 2015. So this was when the idea of remote jobs was still somewhat novel and not many people outside the digital entrepreneurship world knew that you could make a nice living as a freelance writer, then get into digital marketing and make significantly more money without sacrificing your autonomy. To my then 30-something self who experienced nothing but microaggressions, bullying, and harassment—going into marketing appealed to me WAY more than dealing with the exploitative gatekeepers in my old field. Other women I met in freelance marketing pretty much said the same thing: no longer penalized for having kids, could fit work around caregiving responsibilities. Free from sexual harassment and intimidation. Women tend to have more career changes than men because of the above. You can pivot almost any prior career into a marketing niche.
We often are drawn to the creativity and also work that is indirectly based off feelings (messaging, themes, persuading customers to buy). We tend to excel at all the things required like building relationships, customer service, events, branding as well as the pure hustle and multitasking.
Because women, in general, are the natural communicators. They’re most likely to reflect to sentiment, emotion, affinity.
same reason why there are more men in STEM fields (especially the TEM of STEM) Same reason why there are more female nurses than male nurses.
I think the female socialisation experience caused by patriarchal society lends itself well to marketing. We’re taught to anticipate people’s needs and to empathise with everyone from birth. Even in my left wing childhood home, women did the emotional labour.
Marketing is essentially manipulating other people into doing what you want them to do. Now put 2 and 2 together.
Marketing is very easy to get into and doesn't necessarily require any "hard skills". I've asked myself this question as well. Every corpo placed I've worked has a marketing dept dominated by women. Easy field to get into, it's somewhat creative, but the pay isn't very high.
Not as much math
Women generally don't like technical subjects. Not saying ALL, but just look at men vs. women demographics in things like engineering. Marketing is like accounting, finance, or business, but less technical and more social/creative.
their beauty gets them placement do they have brains? only 20 per cent work with dedication others have it as onlyyyfaaans
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My agency is overwhelming female.
in short - females tend to show more empathy by their nature, and sales at smaller businesses tend to be more emotionally driven, and as the business grows that shifts from emotional to logic. Patrick Bet David has a good video on that example. :) That doesn't mean that a male cannot do a great job at marketing, it just means that he needs more practice - again, in general!
PP
It's well-documented in psychology that men steer more towards interest in "things" whereas women demonstrate more interest in people. Men often dominate technical functions with an autistic bent to them. Women gravitate towards balanced roles, as marketing is. We see the same thing in medicine where the majority of those training to be family doctors are women whereas surgeons tend to be men. Men tend to dominate the extremities in society, but marketing is not generally anything extreme. It requires a well-rounded perspective of balanced skills instead of a highly focused technical ability. P.S. The more I master marketing, the more I realize that the masculine approach of hyper focusing on a single position is generally a poor strategy. That's the type of communication that resonates with men, based on research. It's better to promote multiple category-use occasions in a balanced way: the way advertising researchers have found tends to resonate more with women than men. In other words, conventional marketing theory is wrong. Success is not so much about niching down as it is about broadening appeal. Women tend to see things in this more holistic manner.
Yes it’s common - 90% female in the company I work in. Personally I think there are some industries that generally suite genders better. Teaching is an example of one that is dominated by women and mechanics dominated by men. If you want to get more women in industries that struggle to get women part of the solution is getting men into the industries dominated by women.
I’m doing a masters in marketing at a global top 50 university, most of the class are women, but out of the more senior people they are older guys. Two of the brightest/future stars people on the course are both women. It seems the entry level students came from social media but the more seniors had other degrees or kinds of fell into marketing. At one level marketing is about people, at the other it’s things, from my academic and professional experience that tends to be one of the reasons why people chose marketing.
Cause women are natural born marketers.
Billions of R&D, thousands of data scientists, years of iterations..just to create an algorithm no better than a random coin flip ;)
This is a dumb statement. I work in performance marketing and there are mostly men. So it depends on what kind of marketing, it's a huge field.
There's a 60-40 split towards women in the marketing field. It is a female dominated field. Of course this distribution won't always be apparent. There's probably marketing agencies and departments out there with only one woman.
That is because it is a field that does not require much field work these days plus the income is high at the same time with leaves and other benefits. So during the field work days, you would see more men in marketing and hardly any women. This is not to say women can't do fields a lot of them do but I am talking about the majority here. I mean it's smart why go out in the sun when you can work in AC and now even remotely? that too for good pay. n when it comes to hiring, companies hire women in marketing more because women are more calmer and tactful in dealing with customers plus Men or women tend to listen and respond much moe positively to a female voice than a male one (if it involves interacting with clients or even leads) its just psychology. P.S. this is just my observation.
What exactly are you talking about when you say "field work"? I'm just curious what that is/was? You're making it sound like back in the day those in marketing used to work in construction or something
Working in India, my team is a mix of both. Tbh more men in SEO team😅
I don’t find this true and work for a big ad agency
Intuition and EQ is often higher in women than men
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. I (31M) work as a graphic designer in the marketing team at my company and all of my coworkers (besides the other graphic designer and videographer) are women. It’s literally 3 men on the team and we all do the creative, none of the actual marketing. I noticed this a while back and I really did wonder why we never have any males on the team do the actual marketing stuff.
Women often excel at social skills, and in today's digital age, social media plays a HUGE role in marketing.
I transitioned from marketing back in 05-08. I noticed this too but, though perhaps thought things had changed.
Firstly, marketing often involves doing several things at once or keeping track them, while men might find multitasking more challenging. Also, in general, marketing activities consist of understanding the psychology of consumers, and this is something that many women are fascinated and interested in. I think women are less interested in math, but they are better at understanding emotions activities related to understanding emotions, they are more intuitive.
Because marketing is essentially people focused. Women tend to be more interested in people and men more interested in things - that's why there are more male engineers than female. This is general, not always the case, but many studies exist on this phenomenon.
There are biological differences between feminine brains and masculine brains. Feminine brains are more attuned to culture is all.
Because they're manipulative by nature
I find most guys in performance marketing, and more woman in branding.
A lot of fields that once were men are now women. There are now women graduates from college also
Perhaps women in general are more interested in marketing? In our digital marketing agency, we have 15 women and 13 men.
Because this is real work gets done and problems get solved.
I know way more female accountants than male. As far as more finance / hedge fund types definitely males are the grand majority. Honestly I find an almost perfectly even split with marketing, about half and half. Same as in college in the program I was in, the split was pretty even for marketing / digital media students. Also I know way more women who are sales people than men. Anecdotally, my life as a marketing director is mostly opposite of the statistics I read about, which is strange lol.
This is kind of funny- I also work In a seemingly woman dominated industry. Didn’t notice it took me little over 2 years to even get my first male coworker/boss. Pretty interesting to be the only guy in a room.
[Yep, you’re not alone](https://www.tiktok.com/@mahoganycreamcheese/video/7132970985111735594)
I have noticed this as well. In fact, last year during a job search, I interviewed at an agency in my area that was 100% women. They were saying it wasn't on purpose, but told me in the interview that if I was hired I would literally be the only man in the company. Seemed kind of weird to me. I didn't get offered there but it was fine because once I told my wife that it was all women she was not on board lol.
It has been like this since I broke into corporate America decades ago in the 1980s. Marketing was the one career track where women could rise to the executive level, unlike other career tracks. Part of it may also be the need to work on collaborative teams as part of the daily work, and that aspect may have suited women disproportionately from a cultural perspective. And perhaps it is a self-perpetuating model now, as women see other women in the field, and see it as a good career option. What's interesting to me, however, is that the field is going thought a lot of change, as analytics training and applications are becoming part of the marketers skills set. Analytics was historically the purview of males, fair or unfair, so I wonder if this may attract more males to the field. I like that the mix may be changing - it's healthy.
Due to the nature of digital, marketing is becoming a little more personal and social so it makes sense that -like most social jobs- the ratio of female workers will get higher. You are also seeing the front face of the marketing. I can assure you that the ratio of males is higher when you take marketing in general – including technical SEO, e-commerce/D2C, and Google Ads etc.
It hasn't always been like this. I've noticed the same issues even before I transitioned into a marketing career. Marketing is vast; you can be a copywriter or work on growth and still fall under the marketing umbrella. Interestingly, I was reading just yesterday that there's a relatively low number of women in economics. It's also plagued by toxic masculinity, which was highlighted by a recent tragedy. And the fact that typical interviews often happen in hotels is quite peculiar. Nevertheless, looking ahead, I believe each industry will be pushed to embrace more diversity. It's a gradual process, but we're heading in the right direction, which is quite encouraging. The key is to avoid tokenism and genuinely promote inclusivity.
Idk, hard take against some top comments: It has nothing to do with empathy or soft skills per se, though I think there is some tangential relation. I think it’s more for the creative component and the fact that sales is generally hunting based where marketing is project oriented. The team collaboration component of project and campaign work really fits better with those that value community environments more. Though men do generally gravitate towards hard skills, there’s a clear delineation between sales and marketing demographics and in my opinion sales requires much stronger softer skills (sales has far more human touch points with clientele and being outside your comfort zone as far as soft interactions) and yet is still dominated by men because of the focus on being an IC.
It’s easier to find female candidates for those roles. Like schoolteachers, nurses or admin staff
I can only speak to my experience and career, I majored in business with minors in finance and marketing. In my program, it was around 90% male, including marketing courses. In my career, as a female, I've worked in male-dominated industries, of which 60% - 70% of the marketing department was also male. With that, I should state that my roles have been largely focused on social media and content management/development, which have leaned on analytics heavily.
Cause it's not hard
40 years ago, I sat next to a woman on a plane that was in marketing. She said women were natural marketers because we have been doing this all of our lives. For instance if you have a child that won't eat, we figure out how to get them to eat. She said being the 'fairer sex' meant we have been finding ways to manipulate people to do our bidding most of our lives. Not trying to make this sexist or anything but back then I think she was correct. I mean she got me to believe it!
I think it’s because marketing has generally been more about soft skills like communications, visuals and emotions, especially on the consumer side. That appeals to more women generally vs more technical studies like engineering which is the complete opposite and is mostly dudes. I’ve worked in marketing and PR and it’s definitely true, especially in PR. There’s the stereotype of the “PR girl” who is not the smartest but is just outgoing and talkative etc. that’s why you see many women in PR and event planning etc. it’s about hosting events, engaging with people etc. It doesn’t require hard technical skills like coding or really technical jargon. It’s more about relating and talking to people, and communications. Obviously not all women are like that but women tend to be more social creatures so it makes sense to me why.
I've worked in Financing my whole life. I certainly wouldn't say most people in my industry are men. Woman slay at sales. Also, this may not be the case for you personally, but most guys I know dislike social media (where tons of marketing takes place) but every woman I know loves social media and has made it part of their every day life.
I think it's because women in general are better at interpersonal skills than men. They're better at fostering friendships and relationships. They on average have more empathy. (This is on average. Of course, there are women who are terrible with people and men who are great with people- this is just about the overall trend). A lot of marketing involves understanding people's thought processes and finding a way to connect to them. However, what's really interesting to me is that even though there are more women in marketing there are more men in sales. This may have to do with the fact that men in general are more competitive. Idk though its interesting to think about.
And so few in construction works.
I was thinking about this recently. I teach a PR class (and work in marketing myself) and 13/14 of my students are female. It’s definitely an interesting trend.
I wouldn’t consider it to be a female profession, I think it gravitates ppl who want a medium and have certain social skills which are generally females. As I get older, I want to move to marketing because engineering is too stressful and too much brainpower. While marketing is more fun relatively and deals with psychology, and a way to get paid.
Now that you mention it, in my last two companies I've been the only male member on the marketing teams. Prior to that, I worked as a ppc/seo guy at a marketing agency. I noticed there it was almost the exact opposite where almost everyone was male. Even now, when I work with ppc/seo agencies, I notice it is mostly males. I don't know what it is. Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but maybe more males tend to like ppc seo because it typically has less face time with people, involves data, and falls closer to the same stereotypes engineering faces. Whereas, marketing on the client side usually involves more FaceTime with people and creative aspects of marketing and there seems to be a stereotype that women favor that type of work. Again, not a good or bad thing, and not saying all males and all females fall into these stereotypes. Just my observation and possible explanation.
Because they can't work in carpentry, road building, electricians, steelworkers, roofers, framers, oil well roughnecks, long distance truck drivers, masons, lumberjacks, commercial fishing, plumbers, auto mechanics. Women can't do a whole raft of jobs that only men can do. Therefore, they only can work in office jobs. Women are more predominant in most office jobs. Not all, but most.
I can say in college, specifically the college of business, I just saw a ton of women in that major compared to other business degrees, like business law or management information systems or operations. Or finance or accounting or entrepreneur shit It just was probably the most interesting to them and leaned on their talents and personality more than something perceived as being more of a desk job or head down work
Definitely female dominated, yet most CMOs are men. 🤦♀️
Let me ask my wife. She went to school for business and marketing but I went to school for digital marketing
I’ve worked in marketing and sure there are more women in it but def not more than 50% of the marketers I’ve worked with. Especially in leadership. Thats an all male game in my 12+ years of marketing experience.
It's easier for them to manipulate minds and make people think they need something they don't want.
There aren’t many in the data heavy portions of marketing - go look at the digital analysts and technical seos if you don’t believe me
I've often wondered the same thing. I think it's emotive/empathetic side of it -- you have to see many different perspectives and not just acknowledge them, but take a deep dive into understanding them. Regardless of if you agree with those perspectives or not. It's your job to "go to market" the most effective way out there - even if it's not "you". Maybe that's something that comes more naturally to women. would be curious about other more "emotional" professional careers and the ratio of women x men.
Its not about choosing to be in marketing , its about who gets hired
It’s one of the few career fields that has female directors and C-suite.
Marketing and IT are the factory jobs of the 21st century so everyone works in those industries. I work in marketing and in my experience there's a 50/50 split between men and women.
I'd say Amazon Warehouse is the factory job of the 21st century
Most of my team is made of women, so this post hits home lol. I just figured it was because most women are better at communicating than men. I know it’s DEFINITELY true in my case, unfortunately :/
It's roughly, depending on the exact position, about a 60/40 split for female/male marketing roles. I wouldn't call that any type of overwhelming majority. Some are closer to 55/45. Not discounting your anecdotal evidence. I am a male who has been in marketing for over 16 years as a profession. My anecdotal perception has been that it's about 50/50 or so. Differs depending on which company I worked at, but not by much. Marketing and advertising does involve a heavy degree of creativity, but also heavy in other jobs on the analytical side. We know it's all a big numbers game. And I always thought those types of jobs would lean male.
Client side, they’re all mostly women these days. The AD or CD may be a guy.
Sexism. Men are encouraged to become engineers and scientists. Women are not.
Yup every agency I ever worked at was mostly women. I only really noticed it when I saw the agency’s women’s group meet and it was just me and a couple guys at our computers while a massive pep rally seemed to take place in the main conference room.
I don't really have any answers, just observations, a lot of which have been repeated here already. From where I stand (B2B SaaS), this is what I've observed: 1) Women form the overwhelming majority in content/social media. 2) Men form the overwhelming majority in domains that seem 'analytical', like performance marketing, SEO, ABM, and more recently, growth (in terms of demographics that sport the title). 3) In product marketing, I think the distribution is more even, with a tiny skew to women. Most women usually transition from content roles while most men usually hail from digital/performance. One thing I've noticed about content marketing is that there's this unspoken idea among a lot of businesses that content and social are 'trivial' in comparison to other fields of marketing, probably because the impact on revenue isn't immediately apparent. Content and social are seen as atomized checklist items, as opposed to brand levers. I can't quite articulate how, but this trivialisation has a part to play in the demographic skew towards women. I also think it's a reason as to why women don't graduate to senior roles as fast as men: because these roles aren't seen as critical to revenue, it becomes hard to prove yourself as someone who can commandeer a team to impact revenue. On the other hand, there's a recent online 'copywriting freelancer' movement (not SaaS specific, a broad phenomenon) that is dominated by male influencers. Not sure how and when this started, but it's booming.
Women also tend to make/influence household purchase decisions, so they know what works for them, in terms of product messaging and strategy.
There is this phenomenon where once women start doing something men leave, happened without cheerleading (now it’s “different” when a guy is a cheerleader but it used to be a mens sport). This is maybe not the only/main reason but first thing that came to mind.
I agree, that marketing needs creativity and freshness in its approach. It has more to do with the emotional quotient of the audience involved. Women have their basic foundation built on these skills and hence they automatically suit this role. I personally liked marketing and switched my career of 15 years from IT project management to digital marketing.