Journalist. Author. Educator.
The Knight Foundation and the International Center for Journalists are sponsoring a project to train female journalists in Latin America with the skills necessary to produce data-driven stories.
The project is called Chicas Poderosas, which translates to “powerful girls.” Here’s more about its founder and its mission, and here’s its website.
Take a few minutes to listen to this recent segment from New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth. It’s about the troubling trend of digital misogyny.
The web is both intimate and impersonal, two factors that make it easy for jerks to harass, threaten and bully women who speak their minds online. Such was the experience of Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist blogger who produced a series of web videos questioning gender stereotypes in video games. Sarkeesian, who was a guest on the show, received death threats and emails containing images of her being raped by video game characters.
Any kind of violence towards women — real or virtual — is troubling. As I listened to the segment, though, I found myself thinking about what this aspect of web culture means for the women who are building the future of digital journalism. Although Sarkeesian focused on the portrayal of women in video games, her experiences can tell us something about gender roles and online news.
Technology is fueling the rapid evolution of both video games and journalism, making them more social and more interactive. It’s nice to think that these new arenas for interpersonal communication will develop free of the biases that exist in the flesh-and-blood world, but that’s often not the case. Threats of violence or bullying are especially troubling for female journalists trying to build professional brands online. When women are forced to quiet their voices, even subconsciously, it can have lasting negative repercussions on their careers and the quality of discussion around current events.
There is, however, hope that shimmers like those little gold coins in Mario Brothers. The social nature of the web is allowing women to challenge misogyny and stereotypes in new ways, like this campaign that forced Facebook to crack down on sexist hate speech.
Another solution, as one Word of Mouth guest pointed out, is to include women in the creation of emerging online communities. That, too, is true for video games and journalism.
As I write this, I’m standing at my kitchen counter, drinking a blueberry smoothy and wearing a pair of sneakers wet from a run in the rain. My hair is a mess, and I’m pretty sure my T-shirt has a couple of holes across the back. My shorts are gray. Why am I telling you all this? Maybe it’s to convey that I’m busy, squeezing spurts of writing between exercise and showering. Or perhaps I want to describe a typical morning in the life of a modern freelancer/blogger/grad student. Or maybe it’s because, as a culture, we tend to think of women in terms of their appearance.
Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, Wendy Davis’s pink sneakers and, most recently, the wardrobe evolution of Google’s Melody Meckfessel have fueled an ongoing discussion about what’s fair game when describing female subjects in news stories. Like so many things in journalism, there are no hard-and-fast rules. Details like shoes, hair and clothing can bring a profile to life — or they can reveal subtle gender baises and turn a dynamic female subject into just another pretty thing.
Here are a few questions to ask before you drop in a line about her Jimmy Choos:
What’s your purpose for including the detail? Will the information help build a central theme in the story? Or are you including it only to lend color to the piece? If it’s the latter, consider finding a detail that doesn’t emphasize the female subject’s looks. Think of it as a reporting challenge.
Would you say something similar if the subject were male? Detailed physical descriptions of men are lesson common, but they do exist, like in this New Yorker piece about cyber security. These descriptors give life to a story otherwise heavy on tech, but they don’t distract from the important things those men have to say.
How prominent is the detail? As Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon points out, wardrobe was mentioned in stories about the filibusters of both Davis and Rand Paul, but the bit about Paul’s outfit was much lower down in the story. Physical descriptions may be more appropriate if they’re just part of a story that otherwise portrays a woman a complex human being worthy of public attention for something other than her looks.
What do you think? Are there other things to consider before describing a female newsmaker? What are some examples of appropriate physical descriptions of female subjects? What are some of the worst?
Meg Heckman 