#50over50: Catherine Arrow

Too young. Too old. Too married. Too pregnant. Too female. Too disruptive. Too much of a maverick. 

Catherine Arrow is relating the many ways gender bias has presented itself during her decades in public relations and, she observes, they are comments heard too frequently by female practitioners every day. 

Laid off by the boss who quipped ‘too pregnant’, she started and ran her own consultancy for ten years before moving to New Zealand, home for the past 20 years.

She’s now highly respected as a strategist, sense-maker and executive director of PR Knowledge Hub, delivering professional development for organisations and associations worldwide.

She has just been named Global Public Relations Practitioner of the Year at the World Public Relations and Communication Awards and was a past secretary of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management. 

She remains laser-focused on international practitioner education and training. 

‘Most practitioners are trying very hard to make a difference to their stakeholders and communities, act as internal and external advocates for their organisations, raise money, change minds, do all of those things while staying true to our main purpose, building and sustaining the relationships necessary to keep the licence to operate.’

‘But often they work alone or they work in small teams so accessible and affordable professional development is frequently outside their reach. Couple that with the ongoing gender gap and lack of DEI and it’s evident we have to create opportunities to better those circumstances.’

Catherine completed her apprenticeship as a journalist in Essex and East London, moving on to work in newspapers in the Midlands. Yet it was only when she moved into public relations, initially for a local authority, that she got her first whiff of organisational discrimination. Charged with leading and modernising the public relations department, she set about creating a diverse team of able practitioners that could cover the work. Her team was bracketed by the youngest, a 17 year-old apprentice and the oldest, a highly competent 62 year-old former journalist. But the recruitment of an older woman – by a young woman at that – put the executive leadership cat among the pigeons.

‘The personnel director went, to coin a phrase, ballistic. I was in the firing line for recruiting someone who was 62 and he tried to stop the hire. He had no care that I was building a great team – just that there were women on board and leading too. Ageism was alive and well back then – and shamefully alive and well today.’

Having moved to the Midlands for work she began a long association with the CIPR Midlands region where, as Chair, she established the first regional awards programme outside London that ultimately became the PRide Awards.

Yet the CIPR’s professional training remained centralised. ‘You had to travel to London for how-to training courses,’ she recalls.

Since the CIPR wouldn’t deliver training regionally, she decided to do it herself. Then, when the CIPR introduced the Accredited Practitioner programme, the training and professional development became more joined-up, and Catherine recalls a very positive working relationship with the late Alan Rawel. That was also a fruitful time for the relationship between universities and the CIPR with the CIPR organising a series of conferences for academics and practitioners.

Catherine has delivered many guest lectures in the UK and, in New Zealand, she has lectured for Auckland University of Technology (AUT) on strategy and digital engagement – helping academic staff as well as students to adjust to the digital sphere. Lecturing for New Zealand and other international universities has been an ongoing commitment over the years. She also developed and ran the PRINZ professional development programme and was the first to align the Global Capability Framework with an association’s training provision.

Which brings us to her position today as a trusted and expert voice on AI in public relations.

This was not a pivot inspired by the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 but rather the culmination of more than a decade’s involvement in artificial intelligence.

‘It’s been part of the digital training and development that I’ve undertaken with organisations for a long time. AI has been part of our lives for years – wearables, collecting data, spam filters, facial recognition, automation and more. It was evident that the availability of this technology, once released into the wild, was going to be life-altering stuff.’

‘In 2015, I introduced AI to the Global Alliance Milan sessions to say, look, we need to be talking about this. We need to be helping people to understand the societal impact that it’s going to have.

‘Interestingly, people just weren’t interested – I think because they couldn’t see the immediacy or how it was already present in our lives. But that’s the way with adoption and change. Back in 2010 I had scheduled some data-driven public relations sessions and nobody came. But I persevered, developing a framework for the provision of professional development in this space – so it is something that I’ve been running with for some time.’

‘Two years ago, when ChatGPT, MidJourney and others arrived as easy-access generative AI, it was the catalyst for intense interest but this remained mainly tactical and bogged down in content creation.’

‘It was an echo of the sector’s reaction to the emergence of social media – there are lots of shiny new tools to get excited about, so let’s play. But you’d not put an engine on a horse to make it go faster. So why are we trying to retrofit technology to old models of practice? That’s where the shift in thinking needs to come.’

She’s concerned about the impact on society of AI and the rising tide of misinformation.

‘What does valued counsel look like? How do we make sure that nobody’s left behind with this? We’ve got a digital chasm that’s widened beyond the initial digital divide caused by social media and lack of access.’

‘Now we’ve got a technology that makes decisions about people’s lives. A technology they can’t access, can’t influence and they don’t know life changing decisions are being made about them based on the data that’s been acquired.’

Understanding and mediating AI-human relationships is the next shift that demands our attention, especially for internal communication. 

She gives the example of a young employee working with an AI-enabled digital assistant that learns about the person and their work and which then begins to anticipate and respond to their needs.

‘It’s learning about you and you’re developing a relationship with the AI. So what happens when you leave? Who owns that digital assistant and the data it’s been trained on? What will that relationship break do to the employee, the AI and the organisation?’ 

‘Beyond the shiny new tools there are some fundamental questions in terms of AI human relationships that aren’t being looked at.’

She hopes that two PR superpowers can help with this. The first is being able to see beyond the mountains and anticipate what’s coming next.

‘We’ve always had the ability to see what’s coming over the horizon and determine what needs to be developed in order to meet that challenge. AI is great with probability; it’s great with that kind of analysis and is very useful in this context. 

‘One of the reasons I set up PR Knowledge Hub in 2016 was to provide a space where people could access conversations around what AI means to them and to us all.’

‘There’s the professional development offering, but it also gives people the space to talk about technology and its consequences, good and bad.’ 

‘And ask the right questions, which is another of our superpowers. Then we can help people move forward, find and navigate the new norms – because if we don’t, it’s going to get very messy, very fast.’

Our conversation moved on to New Zealand and the country’s long association with inventiveness and innovation. She gives this hint to her lifestyle there: ‘We moved out of the city a few years back – first time rural for me. As a result I now know more about sheep than I ever thought I would thanks to our five pampered fire prevention sheep.’ 

With her passion for education and training, her long association with the CIPR (she’s a Fellow and a Chartered Practitioner), and her expertise in technology and AI, there was much that we had to talk about. So the revelation that she too is a sheep owner was an unexpected twist.

Too right.