Breaking Into the Media Boys Club
Good has a great article up right now, called “Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting Maler”:
It’s easy to hide behind that old journalistic convention of objectivity, but when your “unbiased” hiring strategy results in the systematic underrepresentation of women, something very biased is going on. And the problem compounds itself—male workforces mean male networks and male job candidates and male hiring metrics and stories about men. About half the time, we should be hiring the best woman for the job. If we don’t, we’re part of the problem. So hire women. Write about them. Give them lines. Invite them onto your shows. Just do it, and don’t stop.
Here’s the thing, though - I’d take it a step further. It is absolutely not enough to just hire women in the newsroom. Women also need to be viewed as equals once they are there. I’ve sat through plenty of meetings where women outnumbered men but were still dominated by them. I’ve seen the good ol’ boys fidget, openly roll their eyes and scoff when women speak. I’ve seen the way some women have conditioned themselves to speak in these situations: halting, maybe-can-we-perhaps?, submissive. As a young woman just starting in the field, it was very disheartening to see these smart, savvy women get treated like that. If these women couldn’t make an actual impact, what chance did I have? Was I doomed, too, to never having parity at any editorial table, to always being relegated to hausfrauish administrative work while the boys cowboyed it up on the front lines? It took a toll.
There are no easy answers on how to remedy this situation, of course. All I know is that I’m so grateful to be where I am now, where I have no shortage of women I can look up to, whose careers I can want to emulate, who get the respect they absolutely deserve. I only wish every woman working in media and publishing could say the same, and I hope that someday they can.
