Abstract
“Self-pitying, whingeing piffle” was how Ann Leslie, that grande dame of British journalism, described research by Women in Journalism showing the overwhelming male dominance of our newspapers. There were loads of women in senior positions on Fleet Street, she said, and plenty of articles written by them too. So what if quite a lot of them were about “nail varnish” and such like?
Reaction to statistical evidence that our industry is not the bastion of equality it imagines itself to be tends to fall into two distinct categories. The first, perfectly demonstrated by Dame Ann in an exchange on Radio 4's PM last autumn, can be summarised as: “What are you talking about? I know loads of female hacks.” The second, far harder to ignore, is: “There are people dying in Syria and the world is going to hell in a handcart – why should we care?”
Then, as is the way with facts, something happens that prompts the industry to look down at the ground with a collective foot shuffle and ask whether it's because women, you know, give birth, and so prefer to stay at home with children, or go freelance, or part-time. So, what can we do?
Such a shuffle happened at the beginning of this year with the televising of the government's midterm review. During an hour of questioning on policies focused on changes to child benefit, neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg managed to take a question from a single female journalist.
Asked to explain why only people who looked like the prime minister got to ask questions, Number 10 pointed out that there weren't that many women there. With Allegra Stratton, Newsnight's political editor, doing something else, the tiny minority of women journalists in big political roles made the headlines. Even the political blogger Guido Fawkes took to berating the Mirror group newspapers and the New Statesman for its men-only lobby passes.
Ask most senior editors why this is the case and they answer that Westminster's odd working hours and family unfriendly habits make it less attractive to women. The same argument is used for the relative lack of female MPs – just 22 per cent at the last count.
Yet that percentage — about a fifth, never more than a third – is not just the case for the number of MPs or even lobby correspondents, but most positions in newspapers. The research, carried out by five members of the WiJ committee and published last October, focused on front-page bylines and people mentioned or quoted in all the lead stories. A team of us divvied up the nine national newspapers and simply counted the total number of names and logged their gender. Of all front-page stories, women accounted for just 22 per cent in the average month we looked at.
When it came to those quoted or mentioned in those shop window articles, 84 per cent were men and 16 per cent women. What's more, the men quoted tended to be there for their expertise, the women as bystanders or victims.
Ann Leslie believed, like many in the industry, that this focus on the front pages – dominated by important stuff like the economy, war and politics – was a disservice to women, who dominated elsewhere, such as the aforementioned nail varnish articles. Well, up to a point, Lady Copper.
The front-page research follows similar studies done not just in the UK but also the U.S. and elsewhere that suggests that women still don't account for as many of the articles being written, let alone the top jobs. Research carried out by my colleague at The Guardian, Kira Cochrane, which did a byline count throughout the whole newspaper – news, features, the lot – showed that women again fail to contribute more than men. And in the U.S. a study of leading news outfits by the Poynter Institute at the end of 2011 found that women had written only 20 per cent of opinion articles in traditional media, and 33 per cent of those in digital media.
There is no reason to suppose the UK is different. The research group 4th Estate found that men got asked to comment on key topical issues more often too, even those with a huge impact on women. On the subject of abortion, for example, men were seven times more likely than women to give their opinion in the news. The Washington Post said: “The gender gap undermines the media's credibility.”
Eve Pollard, one of the few female editors of national UK newspapers, said in announcing the recent Woman's Hour power list that some industries were going backwards when it came to women in top jobs. The national newspaper business, where only the Star and London Evening Standard are edited by women, was among them.
Yet it was all supposed to be so different when Pollard was one of the 20 senior women on Fleet Street who came together to form Wij. They did so, she said, because of the overwhelming response to an event designed to raise money for The Journalists' Charity, as it is now called, hosted by female editors.
Writing in the Evening Standard in 1994, not long after the launch of WiJ, Stephen Glover, one of the founders of The Independent, suggested that such a club for obviously successful female journalists “invited ridicule”. Ginny Dougary, award-winning writer, remembers: “They all said ‘why do they need to do it, there are better causes’ and that it was ridiculous and would never work or last.” WiJ has indeed lasted, as have the questions asked of its purpose.
What is it for – is it a campaigning group? Or just for networking and lunches? It has changed dramatically since its early days. There are now many more freelance members and there is a thriving student arm, full of young women keen to find out how to get ahead, learn the right skills, meet the right people. Maybe not so different then.
There's never enough money, of course, but Pollard says this hasn't changed much either. She compares the start of WiJ with that of similar groups in film and TV or advertising. “It was always harder to get money out of newspapers. We're not an industry that cleaves together, are we?”
There aren't easy answers to the question about why men so dominate the media and certainly not enough space here to do them justice. So much has changed for the better – I'm not alone in having been told quite early on in my career that I would be paid less than a male colleague doing a similar job on the news desk because, unlike him, I didn't have a wife and children to support. I'm not sure many men would go public with those comments now.
There's also a sea change in the type of web-savvy young women joining the media, many of them now eschewing established media and setting up on their own, from Vagenda Magazine to Everyday Sexism. But if women don't get to talk about abortion or ask the prime minister questions, news journalism will become a strange place for newcomers and others not used to its piffle.