Abstract
The May 2014 firing of The New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, the first woman to hold the newspaper’s top editorial position, prompted widespread discussion in the profession and in the academy about continuing discrimination against women in American newsrooms. Amanda Bennett, who in 2006 had met a similar fate after only 3 years as the first female editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that for women in journalism, “this event hit like a lightning strike to dry tinder,” not just the firing but the implications that Abramson had brought it on herself by being too “difficult” and by having the nerve to reveal pay inequity (Bennett, 2014, p. A15). During the previous year, the departures of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, like Katie Couric before them, left the face of national television news a very male one.
The problem is not merely anecdotal. “Women are not ascending to the top jobs in any media sector at anywhere near the rate they’re entering the journalism school pipeline,” wrote Ann Marie Lipinski (2014), the former (and first female) editor of The Chicago Tribune, in this year’s Nieman Reports issue titled “Where Are the Women?” (p. 3). By mid-2014, none of the nation’s top-10-circulation daily newspapers and just two of the top-25 papers were under the editorial direction of a woman (Strupp, 2014). Women comprise only 36% of newsroom staffers, a figure that has remained stagnant for more than three decades (Bulkeley, 2002; Women’s Media Center, 2014). “The numbers stink, by and large,” said Abramson during her keynote address to the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference in Montreal.
Common sense tells us that the story of women in journalism (and other media industries) surely is a narrative of progress. Yet these flatlining statistics and recent developments suggest otherwise. Once again, we are having this conversation. Why? What’s more, what does it matter if newsrooms and other media workplaces are full of, and led by, women? Should we be most concerned about equality of access to jobs and promotions, or about how women are treated once they get there? Or is there something even more at stake? Might gender parity fundamentally change the nature of journalism itself?
This special issue compiles 10 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly articles in which researchers have used a range of theories and methods to grapple with these questions. Some of them were published very recently; others are important studies whose concerns have not yet fully been addressed. (Indeed, looking back through the pages of the journal over time, one is struck by how often the same research questions—and findings—recur, and the online collection provides an extended list of articles on this theme.)
Readers may notice the parallels between the recent experiences of female editors and the fate of Carol Sutton, whose 1974 promotion to managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal was seen as so groundbreaking that Time magazine profiled her among its “Women of the Year” in 1975. Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere (2014) used oral histories and archival research to tell her story and those of other female “firsts.” Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s about women in broadcast journalism—where they constituted just over one third of the workforce—conveyed their concerns about pay inequities and workplace sexism and their belief that they were valued only for their appearance. Erika Engstrom and Anthony J. Ferri (1998) summarized these studies and reported that, by century’s end, female journalists were even more worried about a different problem: “conflicts between roles of wife/mother and newscaster” (p. 794).
Around the same time, the Quarterly published its first major study of another long-term challenge, sexual harassment. Kim Walsh-Childers, Jean Chance, and Kristin Herzog (1996) surveyed and interviewed nearly 400 American newspaperwomen, finding that a third of them had been sexually harassed, yet that many felt there was little they could do about it if they wanted to keep doing their jobs. A decade later, Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain (2005) received the same response from female sports reporters, more than half of whom reported the problem but saw it “as something they must endure as they go about their job duties” (p. 814).
Hardin and Shain also raised the possibility that journalists’ gender might affect reporting practices, editorial decisions, and the content of the news product. Other researchers have asked the same question, and some have answered it affirmatively. In a study confirming the conventional wisdom that men appear more often than women as news subjects and sources, Cory L. Armstrong (2004) nevertheless found that “female writers were more likely to write about women and showcase women in news coverage” (p. 149). Teresa Correa and Dustin Harp (2011) studied coverage of a topic of particular interest to women, the HPV vaccine, by two newspapers, one with more female reporters than the other; their systems analysis revealed that “the more gender-balanced organization covered the vaccine more frequently and more prominently, and used more diverse themes than its counterpart” (p. 301).
Other studies have sought and failed to find significant correlations between journalist gender and news content, yet have made more subtle discoveries, such as gendered differences in the format, tone, or sourcing of articles. In her study of political-campaign coverage, Lindsey Meeks (2013) did not find evidence that reporter gender affected coverage of the candidates themselves, but she did notice that journalists covered different kinds of offices in gendered terms—in ways that do not bode well for news coverage of women who run for governor or president.
An alternative proposition—in the industry as well as the academy—has been that for news content to change, women must move into leadership positions in the newsroom and/or the fundamental structures of news institutions must change. Margaretha Geertsema (2009) assessed the outcomes of the “gender mainstreaming” policy of the Inter Press Service, a global news agency focusing on development communication, whose goal was to normalize employment of women at all levels of the organization and coverage of women’s issues in all news content. Drawing on cultural globalization theory, Geertsema concluded that while the concept was well received in theory, in practice the news reporting and content remained predominantly male-driven. One of the most illuminating studies on gender and newsroom management is Tracy Everbach’s (2006) newsroom ethnography of “the only large American newsroom with an all-women management team at the turn of the 21st century,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, whose employees reported high job satisfaction due to an open newsroom structure, collaborative decision making, and “family-friendly” work policies (p. 477).
The studies by Geertsema and Everbach remind us of the need for more attention to institutional policy and the importance of a global perspective on gender issues. Recent scholarship also has confirmed that, even as they move into formerly “male” beats such as politics and the economy, women remain under-represented in journalism’s most prestigious sectors, such as editorial boards, op-ed pages, and prize winners. Similarly, although women are nearly half of all bloggers, they author just 10% of the most influential political blogs, as Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne (2006) discovered in an article using network theory. “The linking hierarchy of the blogosphere prevents women from becoming highly ranked,” they concluded; in a system in which dominance begets more dominance, the authors detected “[o]ld patterns of power and assumptions about the way politics should be played” (pp. 254, 258).
As these scholars suggest future directions for research, news from the industry reminds us that we still lack satisfactory answers to older questions, and that there is an ongoing need for research on gender issues in journalism. The articles included in this special issue are valuable resources as this conversation continues.