Abstract
Vivian Smith tells the stories of the journalistic other. A woman who worked in the industry, then left, she understands first-hand the joys and stresses of family and work. She explores this duality in her book Outsiders Still: Why Women Love – and Leave – Their Newspaper Careers.
Smith interviews dozens of women like herself – women who loved their jobs but disliked the chronic sexism that made them feel torn in a million different pieces as they tried to balance family and work. In the introduction she writes,
The youngest fear they will have to choose between a career and a family; mid-career women madly juggle the pressures of work and family while worrying they are not ‘good mothers’; and the most senior reflect on decades of accomplishments mixed with frustration at newsroom sexism that has held them back.
Smith, who left journalism as she tried to balance her work and family life, tired of working in a ‘culture that offered no flexibility’, (p. 5). She now works as a media professor and wrote this book after the recognition that her experiences were not unique. Her research includes in-depth interviews and focus groups with women who worked as print journalists in Canada, and she used narrative analysis to collect and analyze the stories of the storytellers. She tells their story (and her own) through a gendered lens that considers how women perceived their work environments and their perceptions of power – their own and others – in the newsroom.
What she learned was that women remain second-class citizens in newsrooms. They see their skills and opinions devalued, they feel they must survive in an industry that is less focused on employee welfare and more focused on cutting costs and increasing technology, and they feel they carry a disproportionate share of child-care and home-care responsibilities than their male journalist colleagues.
In her book, Smith notes the irony that women dominate journalism classrooms but are scare in leadership roles. And she observes another irony: that many of the women she interviewed wanted to become journalists to expose social injustice but do not see the own injustices of sexism. Women often feel invisible in newsrooms, she notes, then they become invisible as they disappear from journalism, opting for other jobs that allow them a work–life balance.
In individual interviews and focus groups, a common theme emerges: frustration. For long-time journalists, women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, the struggle between work and family is an uneasy and unending set of compromises. They multi-tasked to the point of exhaustion. While women acknowledged they had worked hard throughout their careers, they cited luck as a reason they had survived in journalism for decades and they accepted (often grudgingly, Smith notes) that ‘powerful forces’ of newsroom dynamics and gendered family roles were largely outside their control. Even those in management, who tired to make changes such as on-site daycare, felt they couldn’t make measurable changes in newsroom culture. Smith writes that these senior female journalists ‘felt they could change things in society, but seemed to see structural inequalities in their own workplace as inevitable’ (p. 63).
Mid-career journalists, those in their 30s and 40s, found more flexibility in work schedules that their senior counterparts, but work–life balance remained a challenge. One woman wondered if she could be a good mother and a good journalist. Another asked, ‘Will my son be proud of me and what I do, or will he think I just wasn’t there?’ (p. 77). While women acknowledged they were working in their ‘dream jobs’, they also saw the tension between motherhood and career as ‘natural’ and unchanging.
For the youngest cohort, those in their 20s, the struggles of work–family life had not become a reality – yet. They saw this conflict as looming, and wondered how it would impact careers in an industry without much job security. They also did not feel the same prevalence of sexism as older women had felt, and some suggested that occasional sexism could be deferred with ‘soft femaleness’. The younger group thought women managers would be able to affect change in newsrooms, helping journalism remain robust and profitable, but they themselves anticipated leaving journalism once they became mothers, so they would not be the change-agents.
One contribution of Smith’s book is that it details women’s coping strategies in an environment that expects conformity and sacrifice. However, the book goes farther. It situates the study participants’ stories in a historical context, observing that journalism traditionally has been a male-dominated environment, and this has been slow to change. Furthermore, Smith considers how the absence of women from the newsroom, particularly in top management positions, has affected the issues that are reported. Smith writes,
The demographic and social characteristics of reporters and the stories that they create and admire are connected. The vast majority of participants had a sense of the need to go beyond their own privilege and said they used their positions to help those they deemed voiceless. (p. 209)
Smith raises the question: How do we accurately provide information to citizens if half of the storytellers feel silenced and undervalued – or are absent because they do not see journalism as a good fit for them?
Smith offers a way forward: If newsrooms want to survive, they need to pay attention, not just to the bottom line, but to respect their employees. Newsrooms should take risks and encourage work practices that allow employees flexibility and control over their work, including paternity leaves, and should expand efforts to increase the diversity of newsroom staffs, so they are truly representative of contemporary society demographics. She suggests that newsrooms should banish myths that women cannot lead, and women themselves should realize they are limited by these corporate mythologies. The bottom line is that a diversity of stories – and storytellers – can improve reporting and, consequently, public policy.
Smith’s book tells the stories of Canadian women who worked at newspapers, but this book is worthwhile reading in any country. It should be essential reading for newsroom managers in all forms of media and should be read by deans and directors of journalism schools, as well as students. Gender discrimination, Smith notes, is commonplace, but it has no place in a profession whose goals are to inform, educate, and analyze social inequities.