It’s time for Women in SPAM
Scrolling through TikTok recently, something stopped my thumb. We're all familiar with Women in STEM but here, finally, was a term I could actually relate to, and it wasn’t a meme about being stressed or underappreciated.
Women in SPAM: Social Media, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing. It’s an accronym coined by creator Laura Cameron, and it's the internet's newest shorthand for a shift that those of us in comms have felt for a while.
The video makes a sharp point. Roles in SPAM, especially PR, have historically been unfavourably seen as ‘soft’ skills, the "personality hire," the fluff budget, are now the ones holding their ground. Meanwhile, the supposedly bulletproof technical and IT functions typically dominated by males, are discovering that AI can do a lot of their heavy lifting and putting these roles at risk. And now, as budgets tighten and organisations look for where the real value sits, some of those same people are realising that maybe the "fluffy" jobs weren't so fluffy after all.
Yes, AI has changed what we do in comms. It's made content easier to produce than ever. But the result? Feeds flooded with what the internet has started calling ‘AI slop’; generic, soulless, algorithmically optimised and deeply boring. What AI cannot replicate is human personality. A sense of humour. The ability to genuinely understand an audience, to read a room, to know when something will land and when it will spectacularly miss. The best ideas still happen at 2am or in the shower, and no large language model is going to crack that, largely because often it’s based on intuition and that very human response, ‘a feeling’.
According to the CIPR's PR Population Report, 66% of PR practitioners are female, but that flips at the top, where 54% of senior roles are held by men. The industry is female-dominated in headcount but still fighting for equal representation at the table where decisions are made. That tension is worth naming; I hope the Women in SPAM conversation starts to recognise not only that these roles matter, but that the people doing them have been quietly underestimated for years.
What's also shifting the dial is AIEO and GEO: AI Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation. As consumers increasingly turn to AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to answer their questions, the currency of credibility, editorial coverage, and genuine third-party endorsement has never been higher. That's what good PR has always produced. The industry is getting its flowers, and I'm here for it.
So, to the women who've been holding it down in SPAM: it was never fluff. It was strategy. It just took the rest of the world a while to catch up.