Hacking Gender and Technology in Journalism

Sara De Vuyst

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367205287
• eBook ISBN: 9780429557118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hacking Gender and Technology in Journalism addresses the question of whether journalism's new digital spaces suffer from the same gendered structures as traditional media organisations, or whether they go beyond such bias.

This book offers insights into the challenges that women journalists face in relation to technological innovation, as well as the potential for developing strategies for empowerment that it offers. More specifically, there is a focus on the gendering of digital skills, the construction of gender in new digital spheres of journalism, and how these changes can lead to the disruption of gender inequalities in journalism.

This book will be of interest to scholars in multimedia journalism, media ethics, and gender studies.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Tackling the gender–technology relationship in journalism

This chapter offers a state-of-the-art of research on gender, journalism and technology. The aim is to hack an important gap in the literature, being the lack of explorations of the gender dimensions of technological innovation in journalism. In doing so, it connects the dots between feminist media studies, journalism studies and feminist technology studies. It is important to note that hacking in this context does not imply discarding previous scholarly work and starting from a completely blank slate, but rather, it stands for illustrating how the insights of these three fields of inquiry can complement each other to tackle the gender–technology question in journalism.

Hacking feminist media studies

When conducting research aimed at disrupting gender inequalities in journalism, it is essential to begin from an awareness of previous questions, methodologies and knowledge raised by feminist academics, activists and journalists. This is not only because to overlook their accomplishments would contribute to the exclusion of women’s voices and perspectives from the public and academic debate but also because gender barriers that appear to be novel often turn out to be a modification of previously documented limitations. Struggles experienced in feminist activism have a tendency of repeating themselves over time.

Consider #MeToo, a hashtag that was used by numerous women, also in media professions, to share experiences of sexual harassment which sparked a debate that shook the industry to its core. This movement has many parallels with the work of second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s aimed at putting women’s individual experiences of sexual harassment on the public agenda. #MeToo turned the personal into the political in a few clicks and created alternative spaces to tell stories that are usually untold in the mainstream media. However, just like in the 1960s and 1970s, several dynamics were set in motion to break the momentum of the movement. Women who shared their experiences were discredited in some cases and the legitimation of allegations was questioned, which can prevent people from speaking up on future occasions. Knowledge of the history of feminist movements increases awareness of the possibility of backlash in the struggle for empowerment.

This book can draw on a rich tradition of feminist media studies in which different aspects of the relationship between gender and media are critically explored (Bachmann, Harp, & Loke, 2018). Questions of gender and media representation, production and reception were put on the scholarly and political agenda by feminist academics and activists starting in the 1970s (Byerly, 2018). The link between feminist theory, research and activism has been a common thread since the early days of this field (Gallagher, 2001). Interests met in the desire to go further than constructing new knowledge, produce social change and disrupt the gender status quo. Views, however, differed on what disruption should look like and how it should be achieved. This is explored further in Chapter 4, where I critically reflect on perspectives on gendered changes in journalism and position the results of my research on gender and technology within these debates.

From on the screen to behind the scenes

The representation of women and men in news media was a focal point of the newly formed coalitions between feminist activists and academics. Quantitative media monitoring was used to criticise media companies for not including women in the news and exposed the magnitude of this problem (Gallagher, 2001). The Global Media Monitoring Project (1995), which analysed the presence and portrayal of women and men by news outlets in 71 countries, is exemplary of this type of research. This study demonstrated two global patterns in news content: women were strongly underrepresented, and, when they made the news, they were mostly portrayed in a stereotypical manner. Since 1995, the project has been repeated every five years in a growing number of countries (GMMP, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015).

To the present, the lion’s share of feminist media scholarship centres on media content, but beginning in the 1980s, attention shifted toward what happens behind the scenes in news production where decisions about content are made (Byerly, 2013; North, 2009). Parallel to initial research on representation, early studies on production used quantitative methods to gather statistics on the employment of women and men in different media genres and countries (Burks & Stone, 1993; Demoor, Saeys, De Bleeckere, Reymenants, & De Clercq, 2000; Diekerhof, Acker, Elias, & Sax, 1986; Lünenborg, 1997). A large number of these studies focused specifically on the news media and were supported by international bodies such as the European Commission, UNESCO and the United Nations (European Commission, 1991, 1999; Gallagher, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1995a, 1995b; Holman, 1992; Holman & Ortiz, 1992). The results, however, were often not comparable because of a lack of consistency in the definition of journalists and in the variables which were measured. Gallagher’s study (1995a), An Unfinished Story: Gender Patterns in Media Employment, offered the first comparative overview of women’s employment in media industries in 41 countries and 239 organisations. Several other international surveys provided an updated account of this landmark study (Byerly, 2011; EIGE, 2013; Fröhlich & Lafky, 2008). The numbers gathered in these surveys show that the structure of journalism employment is marked by three gendered patterns.

Three main gender divides

The first divide runs through the participation of women and men in the journalistic workforce. An abundant amount of research indicates that women are underrepresented in journalism. Gallagher’s study in 1995 revealed that women’s engagement in media employment constituted on average less than one third (32%). More than a decade later, a study of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) in nearly 60 countries found an almost identical percentage of women in the full-time journalism workforce (33%) (Byerly, 2011). These averages do not say anything about outliers and countries that are performing significantly better or worse regarding women’s access to the journalistic workforce, but they do offer insight into a generally gendered pattern and evolving trends across time. Moreover, the gender divide in the participation in journalism employment intersects with age. The male to female ratio tends to be more balanced in younger age groups, but the percentage of women steadily declines as age increases (Delano, 2003; Franks, 2013; Hollings, Lealand, Samson, & Tilley, 2007).

Second, the engagement of women reflects the type of professional position and the power associated with it. Women are commonly underrepresented in decision-making positions and technical positions (Bulkeley, 2004; Hemlinger, 2001; Ross & Carter, 2011; WMC, 2019). This gendered pattern is referred to as vertical gender segregation. A study of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) (2013) in the European Union member states showed that women represent only one third (30%) at all levels of leadership in media organisations. When looking in more detail at the type of positions, women make up 16% of the CEOs, 21% of Chief Operating Officer positions and 25% of board members. In the IWMF’s study, the global percentage of women in senior management positions was slightly higher than one third (39%). Vertical segregation also occurs in countries with gender parity in journalistic ranks, such as Sweden and Finland (Byerly, 2013). The absence at the macro-level of media ownership implies that women are not present in positions where they can make a difference to decision-making (Nicholson, 2007; Ross, 2014). Financial resources and the power to define hiring procedures and policies remain the privilege of a male elite (Byerly, 2004). Because women are clustered in lower positions with limited chances for advancement, their career progress is much slower when compared to male journalists (Hemlinger, Linton, & Smith, 2002).

The underrepresentation of women in decision-making positions is closely related to the gendered division of tasks, also referred to as horizontal segregation (Pointdexter & Harp, 2008; van Zoonen, 1994). Status is an important explanatory factor for the segregation of news beats and media sectors along gender lines. Scholars have shed light on the gendered nature of the soft news – hard news binary. As early as 1973, Tuchman’s ethnographic work indicated how news is classified based on a dichotomy in which hard news has a higher level of newsworthiness and publishing priority than soft news. In her later work, she draws attention to a gendered layer in this distinction by connecting the difference to stereotypical assumptions about men and women (Tuchman, 1978). Women work more in soft news beats that are typically associated with lower status such as human interest stories, health, fashion and education, whereas men work more in hard news beats such as political news, business news and investigative journalism that are associated with high status (Chambers & Steiner, 2010; Franks, 2013; GMMP, 2015; North, 2016b; WMC, 2019). Men are also dominant in sports journalism. A second axis of horizontal segregation refers to gender differences in employment in media sectors. Women are underrepresented in media sectors associated with high status such as the newspapers and press agencies but have made more progress in the audio-visual and magazine sector that are typically associated with lower status (Christmas, 2008; Delano, 2003).

Beyond the body count

Although quantification is valuable to expose the gender division of journalistic labour, there is a growing awareness that counting women and men is little more than “scratching the surface of the realities of media” (de Bruin, 2000, p. 225). To gain a comprehensive picture of gender inequalities in journalism, scholarship has to go beyond the body count and focus on “specific social practices, embodied in conventions and rules, formally and informally, based on history and tradition” (de Bruin, 2000, p. 225). This shift offers a deeper understanding of the gendered nature of newsrooms and allows us to explain where and how gender is meaningful.

Qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews and ethnography are increasingly used to uncover obstacles that sustain gender patterns. This shift in research design went hand-in-hand with a change in the focus on ‘women’ as a central research category to the notion of ‘gender’. Counting merely offers a snapshot that puts men and women into two static, homogenous groups based on manifest characteristics and biological differences. Although these studies cannot grasp the complexity of gender in journalism, there is considerable merit in the ability to track trends through time, make comparisons between countries and spark public debates on gender inequality in the media.

Going beyond the body count means leaving behind thinking in terms of binaries. This shift is inspired by the concept of ‘doing gender’ introduced by West and Zimmerman (1987) that positions gender as continually produced and reproduced in social activities and practices rather than a fixed and natural attribute. Gender is approached as a social process through which social and latent cultural meanings are attributed to biological differences between men and women. In organisational sociology, this way of thinking is applied to how gender operates in work organisations. Gender is not only considered a variable imported from outside the organisation anymore but also something that is actively constructed in organisational processes.

The flexible and dynamic character of gender is the guiding principle of Joan Acker’s (1992) theory of gendered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Tackling the gender–technology relationship in journalism
• 2 Is journalism gender e-qual?
• 3 Gender issues in data journalism
• 4 Hacking the gender gap
• 5 From bytes to backlash
• 6 Conclusion
• Index