Journalism, Gender and Power

Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner, Stuart Allan, Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner, Stuart Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351716604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Journalism, Gender and Power revisits the key themes explored in the 1998 edited collection News, Gender and Power. It takes stock of progress made to date, and also breaks ground in advancing critical understandings of how and why gender matters for journalism and current democratic cultures.

This new volume develops research insights into issues such as the influence of media ownership and control on sexism, women's employment, and "macho" news cultures, the gendering of objectivity and impartiality, tensions around the professional identities of journalists, news coverage of violence against women, the sexualization of women in the news, the everyday experience of normative hierarchies and biases in newswork, and the gendering of news audience expectations, amongst other issues.

These issues prompt vital questions for feminist and gender-centred explorations concerned with reimagining journalism in the public interest. Contributors to this volume challenge familiar perspectives, and in so doing, extend current parameters of dialogue and debate in fresh directions relevant to the increasingly digitalized, interactive intersections of journalism with gender and power around the globe.

Journalism, Gender and Power will inspire readers to rethink conventional assumptions around gender in news reporting—conceptual, professional, and strategic—with an eye to forging alternative, progressive ways forward.

Part I
The gendered politics of news production

1
Getting to the top

Women and decision-making in European news media industries

Karen Ross and Claudia Padovani

Introduction

When women become editors-in-chief at a major media house, it makes front-page news, usually because they are the first woman at the helm, astonishing as that might be in the second decade of the twenty-first century. For example, when Jill Abramson became the first woman editor at The New York Times in 2011, she broke a run of 160 years of men editors. When Katherine Viner did the same thing at the Guardian in 2015, 195 years of male editing privilege came to an end. Women are rarely CEOs of major media concerns and the BBC has never had a woman Director-General since it began life under John Reith in 1922. While the BBC’s strapline has always been to inform, educate, and entertain the public, it does not seem to have a similar interest to represent it. At a time when women dominate journalism classrooms around the world—a trend seen across the globe for the past two decades—one might ask why so few women manage to reach the top jobs. Why do men stay in the profession longer and move upwards more quickly and much further. What solutions could be imagined for what clearly is a problem?

Here, we draw on the findings of a major study of gender and decision making across major European media organizations. We first sketch out the key relevant literature and discuss the provenance of this research and the primary findings of the research undertaken between 2011 and 2012 regarding women occupying senior roles in news media; the policies in place for women’s career advancement amongst our sampled media organizations; and the experiences of senior women who participated in the study. Reflecting on those findings six years on, we argue that until the problems of gender-based discrimination are acknowledged and strategies put in place to support an equality culture in the workplace, media organizations will continue to squander and marginalize the talents of their women staff. This is bad for business and bad for society.

A short skirt through the literature

The relationship of women to news has been the subject of much research over the past 50 years, as indicated elsewhere in this collection. One of the first efforts to document and analyze the women and decision-making specifically was commissioned by UNESCO and reported on as Women and Media Decision-making: The Invisible Barriers (1987). In her introduction to the book, Margaret Gallagher (1987, p. 14) commented that “men’s attitudes, beliefs and even organizational procedures [showed a] surprising degree of consistency across the studies.” As we discuss below, inequalities are both structural and attitudinal and can slyly discriminate against women despite equality legislation. In 1995, Gallagher led a 43-nation study of employment patterns in the media, again finding that women struggled to achieve advancement. Ten years later, Robinson (2005) suggested that despite the numbers of women entering broadcast journalism, they advanced unevenly into decision-making roles, doing best in larger organizations, but mostly stuck in the lower ranks.

Scholarship undertaken in the past few years shows depressingly similar results. The largest global study of women’s employment in news companies to date (International Women’s Media Foundation (2011) collected data from 522 companies in 59 nations studied and showed that overall, men held three-quarters of both top management and board positions: women’s presence was strongest in routine news gathering roles and weakest in technical roles (e.g. camera work, creative direction). This study also found significant national differences, with regional patterns looking very similar to our own. The strength of these studies is their comparative focus, regardless, to some extent, of the number of or which countries have been sampled, because they indicate very similar patterns in women’s employment which seem to be stable over time and space, suggesting structural rather than situational reasons for women’s thwarted career ambitions. While some studies have provided slightly more optimistic findings, the general trend shows little significant progress. Melki and Mallat (2016, p. 57) point to a constellation of factors that systematically “discourage and block women’s entry into the news field, push those who made it out of the profession, and keep those who have endured down and siloed in specific roles away from decision-making and policy-setting positions.” Those factors included gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and the lack of a legally and socially enabling environment, precisely the same factors reported elsewhere.

This returns us to the importance of workplace culture and normative frameworks (see also Löfgren Nilsson & Örnebring, 2016; North, 2016a). Even where improvements have been noted, they have tended to be tied to shifts in the practices of particular media organizations rather than signaling a wider trend. For example, Djerf-Pierre (2007) suggests that women tend to fare better in jobs at public service broadcasters and the more popular press than elsewhere in journalism. Nevertheless, glass ceiling and indeed glass walls barriers to lateral movement within an organization, often due to sexism and/or prejudice still constitute a significant barrier to women’s advancement: not only do women struggle to achieve promotion (vertical segregation), but they are also “encouraged” into areas of the media work that are less prestigious and less likely to lead to career opportunities (horizontal segregation).

Interestingly, sometimes both men and women deny the impact of gender on either their professional practice or their working environment. That said, a comment made by one interviewee in a study of Portuguese journalists betrays a clearly gendered understanding of so-called gender-neutral norms: “in journalism, we are all men” (quoted in Lobo, Silveirinha, Torres da Silva, & Subtil, 2017, p. 1148). In direct contradiction to the imagined gender-neutrality of contemporary journalism practice in Europe, a survey of 390 Spanish journalists conducted as part of the global Worlds of Journalism study found that women had higher levels of education and earned less than men but men hold three-quarters of the posts with managerial responsibility and make two-thirds of the decisions related to content (De-Miguel, Hanitzsch, Parratt, & Berganza, 2017). In other words, women are better qualified than men colleagues, but were not being promoted at the same rate or paid the same salary as their men colleagues. Nor have women made more progress in digital media although these organizations often have flatter structures and little history of an old boys’ network. Edstrom and Facht’s 2018 study of the top 100 media firms across the world again shows a significant lack of women among the leadership of such corporations, including major digital companies like Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon: 80 percent of boards of directors are men, 17 percent of the management are women and only six women are CEOs in the entire top 100 list.¹ It’s hard to make sense of these trends without concluding that somewhere along the line, sex-based discrimination is taking place, unconsciously or otherwise.

Other actors on the media stage are also interested to learn why women face such challenges in achieving positions of authority in the media. Professional bodies such as the International (and European) Federation of Journalists, the UK’s Women in Journalism group, any number of NGOs such as the European Women’s Lobby, and the various Working Groups of the European Commission and the Council of Europe, have either undertaken or commissioned studies over the past few years (see, for example, European Commission, 2010; EWL, 2010). Women also struggle to get a seat at the boardroom table, both in terms of media organizations themselves, but also in relation to media regulators. In October 2012, European Commissioner Viviane Reding formally proposed that the European Parliament should enact legislation to accelerate the number of women in the boardrooms of public companies. The proposal aimed to achieve a 40 percent presence of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors of the top 5000 publicly listed companies by 2020, and by 2018 for publicly funded organizations. Her proposal was derailed by her colleagues’ insistence that the imposition of quotas was illegal under the Commission’s own regulations. The much more flimsy “objective” of gender equality was agreed upon; but achieving this is unlikely, given the historic failure of voluntary codes of conduct to deliver for women.²

Indeed, very few studies have focused specifically on existing policy strategies and regulatory interventions to clarify if and to what extent they support women in progressing their media careers and reduce unequal power relations in media environments more broadly (Chaher, 2014; Gallagher, 2008, 2011; Nenadic & Ostling, 2017; Padovani, 2014; Sarikakis & Nguyen, 2009). This marginal attention to policy becomes even more problematic if we consider that the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA)—a milestone document adopted by the United Nations in 1995 indicating “women and media” as a critical area of intervention for the international community—clearly called on governments and other actors to promote media policies that highlight a gender and to support research on media policies. One major section of the Beijing document also encouraged “the participation of women in the development of professional guidelines and codes of conduct or other appropriate self-regulatory mechanisms to promote a balanced and non-stereotypical portrayals of women by the media” (par. 241.d) while calling for media organizations themselves to “elaborate and strengthen self-regulatory mechanisms and codes of conduct” to comply with these objectives. Yet, all these policy aspects have been widely ignored. This makes inclusion of a focus on the policy provisions adopted by media companies in comparative international studies like the one discussed here all the more important.³ What we make clear is that developing gender equality policies and support mechanisms is not widespread in the media sector; adoption of such policies varies widely both within regions and across regions; and internal policies are important but not sufficient to produce effective, gender-sensitive media in terms of content, access, and participation or in decision-making. More research is needed to fully grasp the challenges that characterize media policies in their relation to gender equality principles and the lived realities of inequality.

Rationale for the study

In 2011, the European Union set aside funding, to be managed through the European Institute for Gender Equality,⁴ to support research on the extent to which the ambitions of Area J of the BPfA had been achieved. Area J has two aspects, one relating to the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in and through media and new communication technologies, and the other to promote a balanced and non-stereotyped portrayal of women in the media. The co-authors of this chapter were commissioned by EIGE to form a team to conduct the research; we draw on the findings from that project below, focusing on the gendered decision-making aspect.⁵

Research design and methods

The EIGE-commissioned research aimed to explore: the extent to which women occupy decision-making positions in large-scale media organizations across Europe, including on management boards; how senior women actually experience their media workplace; and the existence (or otherwise) of gender-equality and/or women-focused policies that have been initiated by the media organizations in our sample. Because the study was funded by the EU via EIGE, a clear imperative was to produce useable findings at the policy level, so a crucial outcome was the development of a set of indicators which could be adopted by the European Council and thereafter used by member countries and media industries alike, against which individual media outlets, both public and private, could benchmark themselves and drive forward an agenda for change. A total of 99 organizations were sampled across the (then) 27 EU Member States and Croatia, comprising 39 public sector organizations,⁶ 56 privately funded companies and 4 companies with mixed funding: we also interviewed 65 senior women media professionals from across the European media sector. As Croatia has since joined the EU, we will henceforth describe the participating countries as EU-28. Our sample of media organizations included a range of TV, radio and print media outlets, including 30 newspaper titles. Although we do not disaggregate our findings by media type in our discussion, our preliminary analysis suggests newspapers are similar to other commercial media. Moreover, most of the women media professionals we interviewed worked (or had worked) in fact-based news media as journalists, editors, or managers.

Project findings

Women and the top jobs

The most striking if not entirely unexpected finding, given previous research, as illustrated in Figure 1.1 below, is the low number of women who occupy senior decision-making positions or have seats on boards: only 30 percent of the positions were held by women, including 26 percent of “ordinary” board seats and 22 percent deputy seats.

Around one-third of all positions we counted in public service broadcasting organizations and around one-quarter of positions in the private sector are occupied by women. Public service broadcasting and organizations with mixed funding were much more likely to appoint women into senior roles (59%) than private organizations (41%). While Figure 1.1 aggregates all the data for all the countries, drilling down to the individual country levels shows that in some countries, women are present in relatively high numbers at both strategic and operational levels in relation to the EU-28 average, with Eastern Europe and the Scandinavian countries showing positive outcomes for women. On the face of it, this appears somewhat contradictory, given the very different socio-cu...