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Questions of identity

Women’s studies was one of the best classes I took as an undergraduate, so it was a treat to spend my lunch hour listening to a presentation about LGBTQ identities among students at Mount Holyoke College.

Interesting, sure, but what does it have to do with the topic of this blog? A lot, actually. Journalism is, at its most basic, a snapshot of who we are now — or, as Jack Fuller calls it, a “provisional truth.”

It matters who is framing those snapshots and reporting that truth. Not every headline comes down to gender or sexuality or race, but those things do influence the way journalists see the world. That’s why so much time and effort is devoted to tracking newsroom demographics — and why it’s important that all kinds of people have a hand in hardwiring the future of news.

During the lecture, I tapped out some tweets. Here they are:

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Between classroom and newsroom, the women disappear

The lone male student in this Northeastern University journalism class is seated in the back right corner. (Credit: Meg Heckman)
The lone male student in this Northeastern University journalism class is seated in the back right corner. (Credit: Meg Heckman)

This blog started as a project for a class I’m taking at Northeastern University, where I’m pursuing a master’s degree in journalism research. The course, called Reinventing the News, ponders how technology is shaping journalism.

Despite our 8 a.m. meeting time, the room is packed with about 15 students. And only one of them is male.

This bodes well for the numbers of women who will help shape journalism’s digital future, right?

Maybe not.

Women are, in fact, well represented in journalism schools and mass communication programs, according to a recent report from the Women’s Media Center. Since 1999, about 70 percent of students have been female.

Women have outnumbered men in college journalsim and communications programs since 1999. (Source: Women's Media Center.)
Women have outnumbered men in college journalsim and communications programs since 1999. (Source: Women’s Media Center.)

That same report found a far different scenario in professional newsrooms:

women have consistently been underrepresented in occupations that determine the content of news and entertainment media, with little change in proportions over time.

In 2011, about 40 percent of newspaper editorial employees were female, just 3 percent more than in 1999. The same percentage of TV news staffers were female, although they made up the majority of producers, reporters and anchors. In radio, just 29 percent of the workforce is female.

What’s going on?

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More resources from Twitter

Since leaving my staff job at the Concord Monitor last summer, I’ve struggled with how to reshape my use of Twitter. At the paper — where I helped maintain a couple of political blogs — it was easy: All presidential primary. All the time.

Launching this blog has forced me to reconsider who I follow and to organize my connections into lists — including this one focused on women and journalism. Some feeds, like @GenderReport and @womensmediacntr, deal directly with the topics addressed by this blog. Other accounts, like the one maintained by Ms. Magazine and this one from Bitch Media, deal with broader cultural questions of gender.

I’ve also included some smart, insightful writers like Soraya Chemaly who, according to her bio, says “feministy things about gender absurdities in media, religion, pop culture & politics. Out loud.” Other pithy tweets come from media critic Jennifer L. Pozner and author Jessica Valenti.

The most useful feed, though, belongs to the Journalism and Women Symposium. Many tweets are focused on the group’s activities, but there’s also a fair bit of pertinent industry information.