VOICES
After 9/11: Where Are the Voices of Women?
I'm willing to bet you haven't fretted lately about how women are faring in newspapering. I hadn't been fretting much myself — until a dispiriting series of realizations began to wash over me. The first came in the eerie unreality following September 11. A few days into that awful time, I started to notice a haunting silence amid the views I was finding in America's newspapers: it was the absence of women's voices.
To test my feeling, I examined the op-ed pages of three of our most influential newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times. I found that, in the first week after September 11, they carried eighty-eight signed pieces. Five were by women. After I delivered this observation in a National Public Radio commentary, I began to hear from listeners.
For example: Tracy Lucht, a student at the University of Maryland, e-mailed me that she had found, in looking at newspaper coverage of the 2000 election fiasco in Florida, that it was covered primarily by men. In five Florida papers and The New York Times, she noted, this huge story carried 135 male bylines, twenty-one female.
Then Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, pointed out to me a study from Northwestern's Media Management Center showing a surprisingly strong imbalance remaining in top newspaper management jobs. The authors said the study grew out of the realization among the center's leaders that they were routinely seeing only a handful of women among the thirty or forty executives gathered for seminars. Yet the school's journalism classes were more than 70 percent women. What was going on?
The answer was that, after some strong progress in the 1980s, women's rise to the top reaches of the field had stalled, so that "women today fill about thirty percent of senior management jobs, the same as several years ago." As for the highest positions — president, publisher, and ceo — a survey of 137 newspapers with a circulation over 85,000 showed only 8 percent held by women. Moreover, the study cited retention problems with women and various "ceilings" that they seemed to be hitting (becoming managing editors, for example, but not top editors).
The authors said they hoped their findings would spark discussion in the industry. But I haven't heard it. Indeed, I think many would hasten to say we've had this discussion, and solved this problem. Yet that blithe assumption is bleakly refuted by the numbers, which demonstrate instead how little has changed in these "feminist" decades. Certainly, women now increasingly dominate the (low-salaried) entry ranks. But in the choicest assignments — and at the top — they are scarce. Indeed, the industry begins to look disturbingly like one of those "pink color" ghettos — a trade shunned by men, except for those who run it.
I was reminded recently of one reason for the slow pace of change, when I was lucky enough to be part of a PBS show made possible by Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She Says: Women in News, examined the work of various women who've made contributions to journalism. One powerful truth emerged: many of these women journalists had struggled mightily to balance family and work. When I became a newspaper editor, I looked up and saw editors like Janet Chusmir of The Miami Herald and Katherine Fanning of The Christian Science Monitor, and I felt a boundless surge of opportunity. But I was underestimating the fear of change and the power of tradition in a culture as deeply rooted as that of newsrooms.
While chewing over how slow is change — and how adamant the denial of any hint that we need to — I stumbled across another interesting tidbit on the Media Management Center's Web site: a study called "Gen X in the Newsroom: Expectations, Attitudes Don't Fit Traditional Culture." Young people nowadays, it notes, "are quite different from their Baby Boomer bosses. These folks don't want to work long and irregular hours, want to be well paid, and expect to get help with advancement. They are part of a job-hopping generation, so their needs will have to be taken seriously because there is a shortage of good replacements coming behind them. Newsrooms will need to make some changes to accommodate them."
Wow, I thought: This is just the sort of attitude women — wanting
so desperately to be accepted, to blend in — never had the inclination
to project. Demanding concessions was the farthest thing from
their minds, which may be why so many have stalled, or left the
trade, I reflected glumly. But wait: these self-confident and
demanding types can't all be men. Not in our craft. Not in those
early years. More than half must be women. It's not that I like
the notion, once again, of waiting till numbers overtake traditions.
But inevitability does have a nice ring to it.
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