I mean it. The issues addressed on this blog — gender roles, media stereotypes, the influence of technology on journalism– are big and complex. Making sense of them will require an open, diverse conversation. To get us started, I put together a video that ponders one of the bigger questions on my mind lately: If most journalism students are female, why are women chronically underrepresented in newsrooms?
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:
Looking forward to a noon lecture by gender studies visiting scholar Shannon Weber: http://t.co/00KthGh9
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.)
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.
Meg Heckman 