Championing Gender Equality in Property Marketing: Insights from The Property Marketing Strategists Survey

When we launched The Property Marketing Strategists, our vision was to create a platform that didn’t purport any gender stereotypes around women in marketing roles or property often being a male-dominated industry. This will remain a key part of our brand and mission.

On International Woman’s Day 2021 we wanted to talk about The Property Marketing Survey and our findings which show that whilst we want to remove gender as a factor, our survey suggests that there is still an area of concern in the sector. 

In our survey, 67% of our respondents were female. The majority of these being in the 32 – 41 brackets, which supports the finding that many of our respondents - 29% - were in mid-level marketing roles. Even more strikingly 66% of those who are currently Marketing Directors/CMOs were male. 

A further statistic to raise is that 53% of the organisations we surveyed didn’t have marketing as a role on their board. 

We need more analysis to understand the reasons why. Are marketers being overlooked for senior roles because marketing is undervalued and not deemed a senior role or do we have issues around a woman not being seen or heard and considered for these senior roles? Are men in senior operations role acting as leaders for marketing and therefore the female mid-level marketers are being managed by men?

The Property Marketing Survey did not analyse salary but Marketing Week’s 2021 Career and Salary Survey shows a damming picture of the gender pay gap within marketing roles. Overall in marketing roles, the gap is down to 23% from 28%, however, the National Average is 9.8%. Even more of concern is the trend that the higher a woman moves up the career ladder, the wider the pay gap becomes with an almost £10,000 pay gap at the marketing director/vice-president level. 

We know the sector wants to be inclusive, transparent and grow its skills. But at The Property Marketing Strategists, we know we need to also be honest about the reality and how we remove all these barriers for our young marketers. 

The fact that we have few senior marketing leaders in board-level roles and positions of influence, and even fewer are woman, will continue to create a barrier for the next generation. At The Property Marketing Strategists, we are aware that the value marketing can deliver to a business is often overlooked – and we want to work with marketers and leaders to change this. As a consequence of this, we want to ensure that all marketers – regardless of gender – know that they can get to the top table and they can make a difference to a company’s brand reputation, deliver on customer expectations and support a business’ commercial objectives. 

We hope that this time next year, the statistics have moved in the right direction and one day gender is no longer needed to be a factor of discussion. 

Finally, we wanted to celebrate those people across the sector who are working to drive change. Change can take time, but together we can continue to make real progress.

Happy International Woman’s Day! 

Get a copy of our survey report today. If you want to discuss strategic marketing for your business or how best to structure your marketing team, please get in touch with The Property Marketing Strategists.