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This paper aims to explore gender differences regarding how men and women perceive the story of a CEO and a customer of different genders in audio advertising.

A Web-based three-way factorial experiment was designed with three storyteller types (founder’s story, customer’s story vs informational ad), story teller’s gender (male voice vs female voice) and research participants’ gender (men vs women). In total, 549 participants were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Researchers found gender-based differences in how audiences evaluated messages from the founder versus the customer of a company. There was a relationship between a male speaker’s perceived authoritativeness and audiences’ favorability to the ad, but no such relationship when the speaker was a woman.

A female voice elicited more favorable attitudes toward the non-story informational ad. In the customer’s story ad, relatability between the speaker and the audience mattered. Participants perceived the ad as more credible and convincing when the gender of the customer in the ad was the same as their gender.

Women showed more favorable attitudes toward the male founder’s story compared to the female founder’s story. In evaluating the credibility of the female founder, audiences cared about her character (likability) rather than authoritativeness (expertise).

This study enriches the gender-related advertising-effect literature based on role congruity theory. The research contributes to the understanding of how gender bias still shapes the audiences’ evaluation of storyteller credibility.

This study sets out to understand the extent to which public relations practitioners use dissent tactics in the face of organizational unethical decisions, and to examine how organizational environment facilitates such dissent.

A web‐based survey was conducted with the assistance of the research team of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). A systematic random sample of 6,126 practitioners was drawn from the 2008 PRSA membership directory.

The results reaffirmed that “assertive confrontation” was the most frequently adopted tactic to resist an unethical organizational decision. Practitioners were more likely to confront management in an organization where top leaders do not support or exhibit ethical behavior. When an organization does not have an ethics code, practitioners were more likely to agitate others to oppose the unethical decision. Selective use of information and sabotage tactics were adopted when an organization does not value open communication.

The study was limited to practitioners in the USA, and the response rate was very low (4.02 percent).

As one of the grounding studies in public relations dissent, this research contributes to better understanding how public relations practitioners make an effort to promote organizational ethics by resisting unethical organizational decisions. The study also sheds light on the characteristics and nature of dissent in public relations, an important but little explored area in the field.