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Women in the Newsroom

The May 2014 firing of The New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, the first woman to hold the newspaper's top editorial position, prompted widespread discussion in the profession and in the academy about continuing discrimination against women in American newsrooms. Amanda Bennett, who in 2006 had met a similar fate after only 3 years as the first female editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that for women in journalism, "this event hit like a lightning strike to dry tinder," not just the firing but the implications that Abramson had brought it on herself by being too "difficult" and by having the nerve to reveal pay inequity (Bennett, 2014, p. A15). During the previous year, the departures of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, like Katie Couric before them, leftthe face of national television news a very male one.The problem is not merely anecdotal. "Women are not ascending to the top jobs in any media sector at anywhere near the rate they're entering the journalism school pipeline," wrote Ann Marie Lipinski (2014), the former (and first female) editor of The Chicago Tribune, in this year's Nieman Reports issue titled "Where Are the Women?" (p. 3). By mid-2014, none of the nation's top-10-circulation daily newspapers and just two of the top-25 papers were under the editorial direction of a woman (Strupp, 2014). Women comprise only 36% of newsroom staffers, a figure that has remained stagnant for more than three decades (Bulkeley, 2002; Women's Media Center, 2014). "The numbers stink, by and large," said Abramson during her keynote address to the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference in Montreal.Common sense tells us that the story of women in journalism (and other media industries) surely is a narrative of progress. Yet these flatlining statistics and recent developments suggest otherwise. Once again, we are having this conversation. Why? What's more, what does it matter if newsrooms and other media workplaces are full of, and led by, women? Should we be most concerned about equality of access to jobs and promotions, or about how women are treated once they get there? Or is there something even more at stake? Might gender parity fundamentally change the nature of journalism itself?This special issue compiles 10 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly articles in which researchers have used a range of theories and methods to grapple with these questions. Some of them were published very recently; others are important studies whose concerns have not yet fully been addressed. (Indeed, looking back through the pages of the journal over time, one is struck by how often the same research questions-and findings-recur, and the online collection provides an extended list of articles on this theme.)Readers may notice the parallels between the recent experiences of female editors and the fate of Carol Sutton, whose 1974 promotion to managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal was seen as so groundbreaking that Time magazine profiled her among its "Women of the Year" in 1975. Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere (2014) used oral histories and archival research to tell her story and those of other female "firsts." Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s about women in broadcast journalism-where they constituted just over one third of the workforce-conveyed their concerns about pay inequities and workplace sexism and their belief that they were valued only for their appearance. Erika Engstrom and Anthony J. Ferri (1998) summarized these studies and reported that, by century's end, female journalists were even more worried about a different problem: "conflicts between roles of wife/mother and newscaster" (p. 794).Around the same time, the Quarterly published its first major study of another long-term challenge, sexual harassment. Kim Walsh-Childers, Jean Chance, and Kristin Herzog (1996) surveyed and interviewed nearly 400 American newspaperwomen, finding that a third of them had been sexually harassed, yet that many felt there was little they could do about it if they wanted to keep doing their jobs. …