The impact of gender on marketing practice

The impact of gender on marketing practice

The impact of gender on marketing practice

There is a gender dichotomy at the heart of marketing which has a powerful effect on how marketing is conceived in theory and implemented in practice. This dichotomy, which has for far too long remained invisible and understated, is addressed in very different ways by the two articles in this mini special issue of the Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science. Each of the articles explore the impact of gender on the marketing role, focusing primarily on the experience of women marketing managers and women entrepreneurs respectively.

The first article, "The glasshouse effect: women in marketing management", examines the experience of women marketing managers and the embeddedness of gender in organisational cultures and management practice. Research with women marketing marketers reveals that they frequently express a strong sense of unease, frustration and even alienation about the ways that gender constrains and contains them in their organisations.

The second article, "Women communicators in the workplace: natural born marketers?" argues that gender has an important impact on the extent to which men and women entrepreneurs adopt a marketing orientation. The authors conclude from their research that female owner/managers are better placed to manage a "marketised enterprise"; that women are, in effect, "natural born" marketers. This, of course, does not preclude men from adopting a more female style to doing marketing, and indeed the reverse may also apply.

We need to allow for the value of both the male and the female in marketing so that marketing, as a body of knowledge and as a professional practice, is sufficiently flexible and diverse to reflect our increasingly complex and contradictory world.

Lorna StevensMiriam CatterallUniversity of Ulster

Pauline MaclaranQueen's University, Belfast