How to evade women’s ‘B.S. meter’ to deliver authentic messages

Susan Spencer, senior vice president, content and strategy at subject matter, comes to PR work after a long history in journalism and magazine publishing.

As the editor for Woman’s Day magazine, Spencer realized that she wanted something more out of her work. She left the magazine at the beginning of the pandemic and started offering consulting services in women’s advocacy.

It was work that she saw as an extension of what she had been doing at the magazine. “We did a lot of stories about women around the country who were facing different challenges,” she says. “We covered food insecurity. We covered immigration. We were the first woman’s magazine to talk about parenting a transgender child. There are a lot of different ways that we kind of acted — in loose terms — as advocates.”

And it’s this passion that has brought Spencer into her latest role with Subject Matter, which calls itself a creative advocacy agency.

“I really hope to continue to focus on women’s issues,” she says of her new work. “And I think that the time right now is really ripe to figure out how to talk to women in a different way, because women have been through hell and back in the last couple of years.”

Women in the workplace