Women and Journalism

Suzanne Franks

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780765853
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In many countries, the majority of high profile journalists and editors remain male. Although there have been considerable changes in the prospects for women working in the media in the past few decades, women are still noticeably in the minority in the top journalistic roles, despite making up the majority of journalism students. In this book, Suzanne Franks looks at the key issues surrounding female journalists - from on-screen sexism and ageism to the dangers facing female foreign correspondents reporting from war zones. She also analyses the way that the changing digital media have presented both challenges and opportunities for women working in journalism and considers this in an international perspective.. In doing so, this book provides an overview of the ongoing imbalances faced by women in the media and looks at the key issues hindering gender equality in journalism.

1

Introduction

1.1 Backwards and forwards – onwards and upwards

‘Is there any sexual reason why a woman should be a less accomplished journalist than a man? I can find none.’ This was the question posed in 1898 by that stalwart feminist writer Arnold Bennett in his publication Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide. He had observed the considerable hurdles facing women who wanted to succeed as journalists, as in almost every other workplace at that time. ‘A few determined, pioneers . . . found their way into newsrooms but they faced multiple obstacles, notably a lack of educational opportunities, the prevailing view that the woman’s place was in the home, and fierce resistance from a largely male workforce’ (Lonsdale, 2013). There was a small band of female journalists in the early days of mass media who managed to negotiate a way through, like the remarkable Nellie Bly in the US (Fahs, 2011) or women such as Frances Power Cobbe or Alice Meynell writing in the English press at the turn of the twentieth century (Grey, 2012), the Prussian-born Hulda Friedrichs and the pioneering Swedish journalists Wendela Hebbe and Ester Blenda Nordström. Nevertheless, the participation of women in the journalistic workforce – and certainly in areas beyond strictly feminine topics – was a painfully slow process.

The route of women’s entry into the modern workplace altogether has not been a steady and gradual path towards emancipation. There are surprising advances and early examples of success, which were subsequently reversed. The history of women’s employment during both world wars demonstrates plenty of cases where what was previously seen as unthinkable suddenly became commonplace – and then once the landscape changed those same opportunities were just as swiftly withdrawn (Summerfield, 1984). Sometimes it is a case of two steps forward followed by one or more steps back. The history of women’s entry into journalism is full of such examples.

In the entire twentieth century there were hardly any female editors of UK broadsheet papers. Yet already in 1891 Rachel Beer was editing the Observer, one of the most distinguished and venerable newspapers on Fleet Street, and two years later she became editor of the Sunday Times (Coren & Negev, 2011). Neither paper has ever employed any female editor since then. Similarly there was a female editor of one of the Northcliffe regional titles in 1939, when Margery Kirk Gatey took over the Exeter Express and Echo, but that was the last time until 1990 that any woman rose to such heights in a local paper. The first BBC News service was overseen by Hilda Matheson in 1927. It was not until the next century that a woman would again be running news at the BBC. Similarly the first ever political series launched on the BBC in November 1929, The Week in Westminster, was produced by Margery Wace (Franks, 2011).

Here as in later years it was sometimes easier for women to forge a way when things were still novel and in a state of flux, but before established rules and practices had become embedded. In this case it was three years later in 1932 that the BBC, in common with many other employers, moved to introduce an official Marriage Bar (Murphy, 2011) which would inevitably impede women’s progress, as they were obliged to resign from the Corporation after their wedding.

According to census figures in 1901, the number of women working as journalists was 1,249, around 9% of the total, and by 1931 that figure had risen further to 3,213, around 17%. Yet thirty years and a world war later in 1961, the proportion of female journalists was barely 20%. The reasons for this lengthy period of stagnation in women’s participation in journalism at a time of rising news consumption and expansion of the BBC include the aforementioned introduction of the Marriage Bar and, in other news organisations without a formal Marriage Bar, the convention that a woman journalist would leave work after marriage because the antisocial hours were contrary to the demands of a wife and mother. Moreover, during this period the National Union of Journalists itself pursued discriminatory policies, including suppressing female wages and imposing limits on the number of females accepted onto training schemes.

Even so the profession offered wider access than others. While in the inter-war years women made up over 50% of teachers, and nursing was an exclusively female profession, in 1931 they made up less than 1% of architects and lawyers, 2% of dentists, and about 7% of doctors. In effect then, journalism presented opportunities for educated women, albeit much of it confined to writing about narrow and traditional areas of women’s interest (Lonsdale, 2013).

In the second half of the twentieth century there were still multiple examples of outright prejudice hampering women’s ambitions in journalism. When the aspiring writer Nora Ephron graduated in the US in 1962, she applied to work on Newsweek magazine but was told that women were not allowed to be writers there, so she had to settle for being a mail girl, confined to the post room (Collins, 2012). Some years later there was a famous fightback by the women who worked on Newsweek, objecting to the limitations placed upon them (Povich, 2012). But these limitations were hardly an exception. The same attitudes of discrimination against women in journalism could be found across the profession, in print and broadcasting.

Three years after the passing of the first UK gender equality legislation and two years before its final implementation, a confidential BBC report in 1973 revealed a wide range of hostility towards women in the corporation.¹ On the prospect of female newsreaders it quoted a senior manager observing how ‘women have class bound voices unsuitable for news reading . . . [and] may introduce emotion’.

On the possibility of hiring women reporters it noted that women would be ‘unable to work in the cold and wet . . . and (are) not able to make overnight stays on location with a man as wives would not like it’. Another senior male editor, commenting on the prospect of employing female reporters, said that ‘although he had interviewed many women for reporter jobs he had “never found any woman with the remotest chance of working in that capacity” . . . he believes that women are simply not able to do hard news stories . . . [but] “see themselves as experts on women’s features”’.

The same editor agreed that he would have liked to recruit women as that would give a spread of knowledge in the newsroom, noting that:

A huge percentage of the audience is female and journalists of their sex are qualified to identify interesting stories on their behalf. When a woman is married her knowledge of the subjects that interest women is thereby increased but of course marriage makes it more difficult for women to work on shift.

In 1964 the first woman news duty editor had been appointed and she subsequently went on to become a duty editor in the Parliamentary Unit in 1970. But the same 1973 report quoted a senior manager in the radio newsroom who explained that ‘Young male journalists do not like working in the Parliamentary Unit, where there is a female Duty Editor in charge.’ And Jenny Abramsky, who later in the 1970s was the first woman to edit a mainstream news programme when she took over Radio 4’s PM, encountered directly this same resistance from a male journalist who requested redeployment in reaction to the prospect of a female boss.²

Yet there are also ongoing examples where established practices and attitudes can change relatively quickly; one moment they are accepted wisdom, yet within a brief time they appear antediluvian. Views on news reading are a good example of this. A year after the hostility voiced in the 1973 report, the TV producer Angela Holdsworth recalls joining a deputation to the heads of news and current affairs, requesting that women be allowed to read the news:

We were told very firmly it was out of the question, how could a woman possibly break news of wars, genocide or rail disasters? She wouldn’t be taken seriously; people would be looking at her ear-rings or hair-do.³

Then a few months later in April 1975 Angela Rippon made her groundbreaking debut on the BBC 1 flagship Evening News programme. The Director of Television commented later upon Rippon’s debut that: ‘Barriers crashed, taboos lay shattered and Lord Reith probably stirred and muttered in his private Valhalla.’ And Rippon herself remarked in an interview that ‘I knew if I made a hash of it no woman would be allowed another chance for at least 5 years.’⁴ Broadcast news, in this respect, has never looked back, which shows that change, when it does come, can be fast and transforming.

However, it is often easier to make such a high-profile symbolic change than to engage with detailed structural problems that are linked with embedded prejudice. Even today, the landscape of women working as journalists in the early twenty-first century remains an uneven one. Whilst some of the ideas still being expressed in the years following the swinging and liberated 1960s now seem outdated, even in a transformed digital environment there remain patterns of gendered employment and attitudes which have proved intractable and immune to change. Take the following snapshots of journalism in the UK over the recent past:

•	In 2013 there is only one national daily newspaper in the UK edited by a woman; Dawn Neesom at the Daily Star. And in 90 years there has never been a female editor-in-chief (director general) of the BBC or at the head of any other major news broadcasting institutions.
•	There has only ever been one instance of a woman editing a daily broadsheet newspaper in the UK, which was fifteen years ago when Rosie Boycott was editor of the Independent for three months from January to April 1998.
•	Even in an age where papers appear online, authorship of the splash or top stories is significant. A study analysing UK newspaper front pages in 2012 (WIJ, 2012) revealed that the great majority (over three-quarters) of stories featured, and in some papers up to 90%, are written by men.
•	Research of by-lines across a range of UK national newspapers in 2011 (Cochrane, 2011) and again in 2012 (Appendix 1) revealed that the overwhelming number of stories in most areas are written by men, so that the average ratio is 78:22, though there were large variations according to subject. In some cases the figures were fairly balanced, but in other areas there were days on end where female by-lines were almost non-existent.
•	The newly inaugurated British Press Awards in late 2012 chose nine judges to decide upon the winners. Eight of them were men and the ninth was billed not by any mention of her achievements in the industry, like her fellow judges such as Philip Knightley or Kevin Marsh, but only by her gender as ‘Fleet Street’s First Female Editor’ (Press Gazette, 2012a).
•	At the well-established UK Press Awards in 2013 the ratio of female to male winners was 4:17 – the lowest it had been in five years.
•	When the Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press by Lord Justice Leveson in 2012 heard evidence from the great and the good in the world of UK journalism, there were around 200 witnesses who were in some way connected to journalism, but less than one in six of these were women^5 – excluding those witnesses who attended because they were celebrities or other phone-hacking victims, in both of which categories women were well represented.
•	A week after the Leveson report appeared and the leading editors were summoned by the Prime Minister in December 2012 to discuss proposals for change, a young journalist Josephine McDermott tweeted: ‘BBC News channel shows parade of white, middle-aged male editors arriving at Downing St, bar Sarah Sands. Cd that be problem with press?’

Although these observations are taken from the picture of contemporary UK journalism, most of them also apply to the composition of the media internationally, with a few limited exceptions. Successive surveys of the journalism workforce across most Western nations over the past 15 years show repeatedly that, whilst at entry levels there is a reasonable balance between the genders, at the senior levels there is a preponderance of men. And the higher the age, the wider is the gender pay gap. The ongoing evidence, analysed later in more detail, indicates that there remain today both vertical gender segregation and also horizontal segregation in the way that journalists are employed in the UK, as in many other Western countries. Despite enormous changes there are still places where women have yet to achieve anything like a critical mass and where there is an ongoing cultural bias against them. However, the nature of journalism in a digital 24/7 multimedia environment has also changed and in some cases intensified. There is a much discussed revolution under way in the news industry, which further begs the question of what are the relevant underlying trends for the prospects of female journalists in a more fragmented, globalised, and diverse media landscape?

The roles played by women outside of the home have continued to evolve in the period following the first equality legislation of the 1970s. Issues such as the pay gap or sexual harassment in the workplace are much debated, if not resolved. Yet despite this awareness there are still prevailing expectations about the responsibilities of women within the family and fierce public ‘having it all’ style arguments which intermittently rage about this topic.⁶ It is therefore difficult to disentangle the extent to which better prospects for women in journalism are invariably contingent upon wider societal adjustments, well beyond the scope of this analysis.

Nevertheless, there is an argument that, as journalism and the media play a role in moulding public consciousness, there is a duty upon them to include a wider range of voices at all levels. Sue Matthias, editor of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and former chair of the pressure group Women in Journalism, is clear about this: ‘A good and successful newspaper should reflect the society it’s reporting on. If women are not in the fabric of the organisation, you’ve got a worse product’ (Janes, 2011). It is this which makes the consideration of women and journalism something which is significant beyond issues of straightforward equity in employment matters. If there is not a wide diversity at all levels producing the output, this may affect the nature of the product; in particular whose voices are being heard and how stories are being told.

1.2 Where does it all begin? The feminisation of journalism education

There has always been ambivalence about the extent to which journalism may be viewed as a profession (Ornebring, 2009) and much debate about the whole construct of professionalism in this context (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003). These considerations have been mirrored by the variety of routes into journalism, which have evolved since the early twentieth century. Historically, the pattern of apprenticeship and indentures, usually through the local or regional press, was the commonest way to embark upon the career ladder. For the lucky few this would develop into shifts and eventually maybe a staff posting on a national paper. There was an attitude of ‘school of real life’ as a necessary training for successful journalists and a disdaining of higher education as a useful preparation for the workplace. Th...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Blurb
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Executive Summary
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Where Are the Women?
• 3. Beyond the Glass Ceiling
• 4. A Feminised News Agenda
• 5. Conclusions and Recommendations
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Series Page