A newsroom with or without women?

Annu Vishnu

In the international Sage journal, an article titled “How Power and critical mass relate to the coverage of HPV vaccine” focused on the concept on Women Matter in Newsrooms: How Power and Critical mass relate to the coverage of HPV Vaccine

From its founding, there can be no doubt in my mind that newspapers have been important to the country’s history and to incite public consciousness. However the role of women in journalism, their much less featured writing in newspapers has always baffled me with questions unanswered. Recently happened to read the article by Teressa and Dustin on “Women Matter in Newsrooms: How Power and Critical mass relate to the coverage of HPV Vaccine “ , published on June 1 , 2011. The research study, the presentation of the facts and their coverage of HPV Vaccine further armor plated my thought process and take of women in journalism.

The rise of women journalism has been a recent development and women as a whole did not receive equal standing in the nation’s newsrooms. Every year more and more women enter the journalistic profession, but women are still underrepresented in today’s newspapers. This is significant because half of the population has routinely been denied a voice in the public forum or has had that voice restricted as a result of editorial decisions, treatment in the workplace, and a lack of public consciousness. There is not a lot of debate over whether or not women have been repressed in newsrooms.  However, there are more subtle debates going on amongst researchers about the reasons for this discrimination and the ways in which females perceive themselves in the workplace. 

There are few themes that should be like touched upon in women journalism. The increase in female journalistic recognition has been incredibly slow and this would attribute to the fact that female journalists have traditionally learned to accept traditionally male characteristics in the newsroom. Slow increase in women’s journalistic roles is also directly proportional to the slow increase in editors’ acceptance of women in the industry.  Editors hold enormous power, and they can retain their position for years.  It takes a long time for an editor to retire; the new editor that comes along is only slightly more comfortable with female journalism.  To become an editor requires years of experience, so when a new editor is chosen, he represents the value structures of his journalistic training 20 or more years ago.  Thus, editors are decades behind the curve in terms of their acceptance of women.

The female dissatisfaction with the work of journalism and mistreatment in the workplace is something which the article doesn’t talk about and is a theme which I believe also holds relevance.  .  Like in other professions, women are promoted less often than men, and reach a glass ceiling in the promotional structure. The work conditions for women plays a factor for women to choose an early exit of the field  and Women leave the newsrooms due to uneven expectations from editors and other writers, high stress from a need to prove the worth of a woman in the newsroom, or assignment beats that are unfairly assigned based on gender discrimination.

The prevalence of public ignorance to the issues of female journalistic inequity should be noted as one of the major reasons why the public is not more aware of journalism’s gender normative practices is because it is difficult to distinguish between a female and a male’s writing. The public does not know that women are being repressed and also that females produce the same quality of work as male authors, and the discrimination is unwarranted.  Additionally, the ordinary outlets where people would hear about gender inequity in journalism are male-dominated.  The places where the public might hear about gender inequality are the same places being gender normative.

We have seen that the front page of the nation’s top newspapers reflects a disparity between the genders that can also be observed in the newsroom.  My review suggests no differences in writing quality, but stark differences in front-page authorship instances between male and female authors.  Although some papers are more gender normative than others, on the whole no paper represents an even 50/50 distribution of authorship instances, much less a female dominated front page.  The movement toward gender equality in journalism has always been a slow one, and in the future I have no doubt we will see male-female authorship ratios even out.  However, at the moment, men dominate newspapers, and as such they are repressing voices from half of the population.