I spoke this evening at a Women in Journalism event that launched its study “Women in Journalism: A-Gendered Press?”, marking International Women’s Day. These are some thoughts from it…
The results of the report will come as no real surprise to anyone who works in the media. To take a few of the headlines: “74% of news journalists are men, whilst women make up just one third of journalists covering business and politics. Just 3% of sports journalists are women. Women are less likely to be in senior positions, with eight out of the top ten newspapers having almost twice as many male editors as women editors.”
You can, of course, look at this from different angles. When you consider that nearly 90% of the directors of FTSE 100 companies are male, and nearly 80% of MPs are male, you could say that (with the notable exception of sport), the press isn’t doing too badly.
If, however, you reflect that the press plays an important place in creating our view of the world, then the results are disgraceful.
There are two big questions really: why? and what can we do about it?
Some elements of this are not unique to the press: issues around working hours being compatible with family and caring responsibilities, around the impact of motherhood, on careers extend across industries. And I certainly think the idea of ending the division between maternity and paternity leave, and heading towards a Swedish-type system that in effect forces fathers to take a significant period of paternity leave or the family loses it, would be a good step. (As the WiJ report suggests.)
The WiJ report also identifies, in a way I’ve not seen before, a way in which this plays out in the media, with the ageism now evident across the press – generally men in their 30s and 40s are making the bulk of the decisions: if women take say a decade out, or treading water, while they’ve got young children, they’ve effectively given themselves little or no chance of getting to senior editorships.
Doing something to end, or at least reduce, that ageism, would be good for those women – and good also I’d suggest for readers, who’d get a more varied range of perspectives.
Reading around the subject of the shortage of women in the mainstream press, I came across this report from last month from the US press, on women’s presence on the opinion pages. It concludes that women are far less likely to put themselves forward as “experts”, far less likely to review their opinions as “worthy” of a high-profile spot.
There is I think a responsibility on women, to put themselves forward, to push, to say “I can do it”, “I’d be good”, all things that traditionally we’re very much not socialised to do.
Not that I’d say this is easy – women are far more likely to be given nasty labels, “pushy”, “aggressive”, “tough” (and not in an admiring way) for behaviour that from a male wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. (And everyone, women and men, if they find themselves using that label about a woman, even just in their own head, should ask themselves how their opinion relates to gender.)
But that puts also the responsibility for editors: to ask, and keep asking “where are the women?” Your job as an editor is to make your pages as interesting, as informative, as broadranging as possible. And I’d argue that needs a high percentage of women’s contributions. Not because I’m a biological essentialist, but because women have very different experiences, have to follow very different paths through life, and see different things, to men.
I’ll take as an example of this my experiences as the founder of the Blog Carnival of Feminists. I spent quite some time and effort with various male political bloggers suggesting to them that feminist blogs – covering issues such as the disproportionate impact of the cuts on women, the severe shortage of women MPs, etc were very much political – yet “feminist” blogs were seen, and continue to be seen as different from “political” blogs, overwhelming written by men and very many of which treat politics as a sporting contest in which goals are scored and leaks dribbled out.
The definition of what is “politics” is still overwhelming determined by men.
And then there’s sport. I once got rather a lot of attention on Cif for a blog about “Waynetta Rooney”, which highlighted the fact that Fifa (and a number of other international and European sporting groups) manage to get away with overt, unapologetic sexism, with little or no challenge. The whole culture of sports reporting is a subject all on its own, but 3%! That figure really says a lot.
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