If I had a dirham for the many times I've had to explain what my job is – and what I do exactly – I would currently be a main cast member on Netflix’s Dubai Bling.
Sadly, I didn’t monetise that exercise, and so, I’ve had to spend over a decade trying to explain, which constitutes shaping how a brand is seen, understood and experienced by the masses.
I currently work as a freelance communications consultant and writer, but PR is still my bread and butter, and I am personally thrilled for the enthusiasm and attention we are receiving as women in SPAM – an acronym for social media, PR, advertising and marketing.
This, thanks in part to the Internet realising that we’re all not just personality hires. Now, these so-called SPAM roles are having their heyday in the cultural zeitgeist, and my social media feeds are inundated with numerous explanations and celebrations.
The "gentrification" of SPAM
While I love how the acronym has now been added to the popular women-in-STEM plane, let’s not forget that this sudden fanfare is a direct reaction to something a bit more insidious. Although SPAM is still viewed as a very female-dominated field, there is a not-so-subtle rebranding of our industries into a more "serious" or masculine-leaning role, with more men pivoting due to AI making a lot of their predominant industries and roles redundant.
As this insightful LinkedIn post by Clementine Doyle explains, communications is being masculinised, akin to how the early days of computing worked in the mid-twentieth century. Doyle continues to highlight how in the past, computer programming wasn’t considered prestigious work and was historically seen as a highly feminised job, where programmers were an extension of more “important” labour and more likely to be done by women because of that perception. She goes on to write: "Magazines of the time ran features on “computer girls” (pictured below) framing the work as technical, but not intellectual in the way that hardware design or theoretical engineering were understood to be."
The SPAM rebrand
Started off as a cheeky internet term, coined by creator Laura Cameron, it is important to highlight that women in SPAM are more than just the unrealistic Emily in Paris caricature or Samantha Jones from Sex and the City.
Women in SPAM stand for so much more. I don’t have to lionise all the stellar work we have been seeing during our annual award ceremonies or the numerous campaigns that populate our billboards or screens. There is a huge number of talented women working in these disciplines, who are responsible for nearly everything you lay your eyes on. Some of the things we do on average include deep research, managing communication strategies, handling public perception, creating content (often with a nothingburger brief), meeting insane deadlines and making sure that our clients aren’t just chasing a flash in the pan but being intentional about what we stand for.
However, SPAM roles are progressively being renamed with more technical-sounding titles due to the subtle but implicit rebranding taking place. It’s now considered cool to work in a job with a snazzy technical-sounding title. Roles once anchored to traditional titles like Content Writer, Brand Manager, or Communications Executive are increasingly appearing under new labels – among them Growth Marketer, Demand Generation Specialist, Revenue Marketing Manager, and Lifecycle Marketer as organisations borrow the language of commercial outcomes and technical functions to reframe what are, in many cases, familiar disciplines.
That being said, we can’t realistically win the gender war if we are arguing over nomenclature and the ethics of rebranding without addressing the proverbial elephant in the room – the under-representation of women in SPAM in boardrooms.
Women are still severely under-represented in boardrooms across both agency and client sides. A report from the Global Women in PR Annual Index 2024 found that 61% of PR boardrooms are still quite male-dominated. The same research found that 91% believe more needs to be done to ensure women move into leadership roles.
For now, the reality is that the “Gen-Z intern” editing those viral TikToks is likely a grown, well-experienced woman leading a brilliant content strategy and advising her stakeholders on how they can game the algorithm and drive conversation.
So, let’s hear it for the women in SPAM – it's about time everyone got on board.
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