Gendered labour and media: histories and continuities

Introduction

On the evening of 5 September 1975, about 200 women descended on the site of the editorial offices of the Canberra Times (CT), demanding the right of reply to an editorial entitled the ‘Role of Women’. The editorial had been hostile to delegates attending the ‘Women and Politics’ conference at the Australian National University in Canberra, organised by the Federal Labor government’s International Women’s Year (IWY) Secretariat as the major national event for IWY (Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) Online, 2015). The CT’s editorial urged the delegates to recognise the traditional role of women in upholding the ‘integrity of the family’ and to temper their ‘rightful anger with humour’ (CT, 1975b).

About 150 of the protesters occupied the CT offices for ‘about an hour … [s]tanding on desks and chairs and filing cabinets, and even sitting on partitions in the office, [while] some of the women shouted abuse and insults’ at John Farquharson, acting editor and assumed author of the editorial (CT, 1975c). Although CT journalist Jacqueline Rees had been reporting daily in positive terms from the conference since it began on 30 August, the group argued that ‘the editorial had expressed sexist views’, and misrepresented the conference delegates as man-hating home-wreckers (CT, 1975c). According to a statement titled ‘Women’s Media Action’ that appeared in the CT the following day, when the activists had asked Farquharson to define feminism, he replied, ‘Feminism is femininity’: ‘This comment demonstrates an inexcusable ignorance of the principles and aims of feminism, and indicates the typical media reluctance to acquire knowledge which contradicts its prejudiced opinions’ (CT, 1975a). Apart from demanding that ‘women members of The Canberra Times staff be allowed to write editorials’, the group criticised the editorial as an invidious example of mainstream media coverage of the event, particularly in how it had described the women, and feminists in general, as threatening ‘the integrity of the family’ for advocating equal employment for women and thus betraying their natural roles in ‘transmitting, fostering and protecting life’ (CT, 1975b).

This introductory article departs from this intervention – which occurred at the height of second-wave feminism in Australia – to provide an overview of the themed issue. A focus on labour within media is argued to help both media scholars and historians of gender better understand the salient relationships between feminist critiques of media representation and the emergence of a variety of gendered media forms. This introduction aims to set the contemporary changes to media industries and production cultures against historical narratives of feminist activism around media representation. After exploring the wider context of the 1975 protest, we review recent feminist and critical perspectives on the kinds of labour required by an omnipresent media environment. A persistent theme of this research is that recent changes in media industries have seen the devaluation of professional work cultures, as working in such industries has become more precarious. This shift in frameworks of recognition has taken place at the same time as an intensification and intimisation of the demands of such work. These changes are set against legacies of the devaluation of women’s work within media. The article then draws out the need for a historically informed position on the gendering of media labour, and concludes with an overview of individual contributions to the issue.

Gendered media agendas and historical agency

Coming as it did in the heady last few weeks of the Whitlam Labor government, before its dismissal on 11 November 1975, the ‘Women and Politics’ conference represented a confluence of a reformist state project in the name of racial, gender and class equality and second-wave feminism. The rhetoric of the government was revolutionary, calling on women to seize the moment for action and take up opportunities that had so far been restricted to a privileged few (Whitlam, 1975a). Feminist political scientist Carol Johnson has called Whitlam’s opening speech at this conference ‘equivalent in importance’ to the acclaimed 1992 ‘Redfern Speech’ on Aboriginal issues by then Prime Minister Paul Keating (Johnson, 2002: 2) for the way that Whitlam (1975b) articulated a public voice for women as a vital part of his modernising project:

For most of this country’s history women have lived without visible political power; they have been excluded from almost all levels of government in our society. The momentous decisions which affect how all people live have been made by a minority of individuals who happen to be born white and male … We all live in this man-made, man-defined and man-controlled world.

The historical intensity of the conference, bookended by the formal opening speech of a reformist Prime Minister and the unruly women’s occupation of a major daily broadsheet, seems to have been subsumed within the wake of the constitutional crisis that followed. Yet, we argue that the actions of these women have much to tell us about current debates concerning the role of media in contemporary feminism and the changing fortunes of media work. These questions are taken up by this issue, which focuses on the centrality of media to understanding the role of gender in recent history, and the relevance of histories of gender to contextualising current debates around media (for important work on this nexus in the British context, see Andrews and McNamara, 2014).

While a United Nations Interregional Seminar on ‘Women, the Media and the Arts’ planned for late November 1975 was cancelled at the height of the government’s political and financial problems (National Archives of Australia (NAA), 2016), media coverage of the ‘Women and Politics’ conference, although critical, gave a platform for intervention. The events provoked local reflection on the gendered nature of the production cultures of the Australian media. Collectives such as Sydney’s Media Women’s Action Group (Moylán et al., 2014) – which was clearly linked to the protest at the CT on the night – were connected to transnational movements that had been engaging with media as a gendered industry and workplace for some time.

A keynote speaker at the conference, the British academic and feminist Juliet Mitchell, exhorted Australian women to resist media sexism, linking the formations of masculine power and stereotypes expressed in the CT’s editorial to a need for women to exert their collective agency:

[British women] went through this seven years ago. It doesn’t happen to us now because we got a group together and boycotted the media. … We wouldn’t talk to them and when we decided we could take on the media on our terms, we said, ‘We’ll only talk to the women of the media’ (1975a).

Mitchell spoke of a gendered division of labour that was being transformed by the opportunities of a changing media agenda: ‘We don’t get contracts at home but we are paid by television and radio for our thoughts and our energy’ (CT, 1975a: emphasis ours). In this aspect, the protest built on Mitchell’s analysis to contrast the unpaid labour of the private sphere with the paid and politicised work that women were finding in the contemporary media landscape.

This portrayal of the confluence of women’s rise to prominence in the public sphere and modern media forms brings to light the profound changes in capitalism that coincided with second-wave feminism. Such ‘disorderly conduct’ was a feature of Women’s Liberation, notes Magarey (2014), and women ‘continued to erupt through the bounds of convention over and over again, throughout the 1970s and beyond’ (p. 76). Months before the Canberra protest, on International Women’s Day (8 March 1975), the Australian Women’s Broadcasting Cooperative (AWBC) within the ABC launched its feminist radio programme, the very name of which issued a challenge: the Coming Out Ready or Not Show. The same day that the first show went to air, ABC women left their offices to join the annual International Women’s Day march through the streets of Sydney. One of the founding members of the AWBC, Liz Fell (1995), recalled, ‘Typists, clerks, librarians, secretaries, TV and radio producers and their assistants had all turned up in a demonstration of solidarity with the broader women’s liberation movement’ (p. 1). As well as wresting control from senior male staff over the production and the content of women’s programming, the AWBC also provided crucial training for female editorial and technical staff, addressing a chronic lack of opportunity for women within the organisation (Fell, 1995). As Murphy and Andrews discuss in this issue, women have long realised that in order to influence the media’s representation of women, they needed to gain control over the modes of production.

The same concerns about gender inequality and discrimination were also being expressed by women working in the UK media industries, and were detailed in the Patterns of Discrimination report produced by the sector’s union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTAT) (1975). The union claimed that the report ‘transcends the frontiers of the communications and entertainment industries’, and made a crucial ‘contribution to the debate on the position of women which in International Women’s Year is properly mobilising the labour movement behind hard edged policies to achieve women’s rights as citizens and workers’ (ACTAT, 1975).

In her transnational study of three professional women journalists and feminist activists in the United States and Australia, Diane Kirkby (2013) points out that the media has always been instrumental in helping women activists to ‘find their public voice’ (p. 83), and a tool for education and mobilisation on issues affecting women. Margaret Henderson (2006) argues that Australian feminists have been particularly drawn to print journalism as a means to ‘construct a past of the modern women’s movement’ (p. 131). Despite this, the impact of the broader feminist movement on the relationship between women and the media has been underexplored by scholars, as previously noted by Byerly (2012). In this issue, Gleeson makes an important contribution to these discussions through her examination of online feminist activism.

Women’s labour in media industries

This volume focuses on both gendered experiences of labour in the media, and representations of gender and work in the media. Existing work within the emergent field of study of women’s labour in media industries has tended to centre on particular time periods, with the interwar years developing as a key point of focus (Baker, 2015; Murphy, 2016). In this issue, the importance of the interwar period as a particularly productive time for women working in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is demonstrated by Murphy, while Andrews provides a welcome extension of the literature through her examination of women working in Australian public broadcasting into the 1970s. Darian-Smith surveys the experiences of Australian women press photographers from the 1970s to the 1990s to highlight the connections between production cultures and media representations. Longitudinal studies of women’s labour patterns in media industries, or work that adds to understandings of how women’s opportunities were impacted by broader events, such as war, are yet to emerge.

As one of us has argued previously in Media International Australia (Lloyd, 2014), the situation of women journalists in print can be traced through debates over the scope of the ‘women’s page’ in commercial daily newspapers. The rise and fall of the women’s page as a media ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists’ industrial situation up to and including the second wave (Lloyd, 2014). Furthermore, US-based feminist media historians have explored the rich vein of gendered news agendas, by documenting the career histories of individual journalists (Yang, 1996) and the negotiations by media employees themselves of transitions away from a dedicated women’s page in newspapers (Harp, 2006). The production contexts of these historical studies stand as an important intervention into debates around gender and media that have more often focused on gendered representation and consumption.

A considerable amount of feminist research on women and the media has focused on representation and the issue of women’s on-screen absence (Byerly, 2012). Less research has examined how gender relations in the media inform and produce these representations (North, 2009, 2016), or, until recently, on women’s experiences within production cultures (Ball and Bell, 2013). Riordan (2002) has challenged feminist scholars to study media economies, arguing that matters of content, labour and resources are never gender-neutral. Byerly (2004) has called for more sustained political economic analysis of women’s position in media industries and of the relationship between media ownership and production, and argues (Byerly, 2012) that comprehensive studies of women’s occupational status require consideration of the larger framework of men’s economic and professional power in media industries.

Since the 1990s, government and industry reports have provided data on women’s participation in the Australian media industries, and pointed to their underrepresentation and their lower status and pay, yet scholars have only recently turned to interrogating women’s labour in the media from a historical perspective. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that for most of the 20th century, women working in the Australian media were confined to gendered work considered of lesser value, and given less opportunity for advancement to higher paid positions (Baker, 2015; Clarke, 2014; Lemon, 2008; Lloyd, 2014; North, 2014).

Although Australian women journalists were granted wage equality with their male colleagues in 1917, more than 50 years prior to the federal equal pay cases of 1969 and 1972, the history of women in journalism is a story ‘not of gender equality, but of persistent discrimination’ (Baker, 2015: 1). Recent reports on the broader media industries indicate that invisible barriers are being masked by ‘a perception of equality’ (French, 2012; North, 2013; Screen Australia, 2015), and some positions, such as makeup and production assistant, have become so feminised that one study dubs them ‘female ghettoes’ (French, 2012: 7). Across the developed world, women working in the media continue to experience significant obstacles to progress, and a glass ceiling prevents most women from achieving senior positions in management and governance (Byerly, 2011; Byerly and Ross, 2006: 77).

While scholars have studied women’s histories through feminist media outlets, they have not often characterised the work done by the editors, contributors, designers and so on, who put these artefacts together as work. As Hendy (2012) points out, media historians have been reluctant to tackle the experiences of those below the management level of organisations, commenting that ‘beyond the upper ranks much cultural activity remains uncharted’ (p. 362). Even when considering gender and class in the field of labour history, discussions of gendered labour have been conspicuous by their absence (Spongberg, 2008). Australian studies of broadcasting from a gendered perspective have mainly focused on content aimed at women (Arrow, 2005; Lloyd, 2007) or on key personalities (Bye, 2010) rather than on content creators. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, until recently women’s role in television and film production has been ‘poorly understood and subjected to critical silence’ (Ball and Bell, 2013: 547). While much work in the emerging field of feminist production studies has centred on film, in recent years Ball and Bell (2013) have analysed ‘invisible labour’ and ‘below-the-line’ female employees in British film and television, and Mayer (2014) has illuminated the development of feminised labour in early American telephone companies, and its relationship with feminised professions in contemporary media industries.

Media historiography

While production analyses have always been a strong element of media studies, the historical agency of women as media producers within disparate media forms and contexts have sometimes been lost in a predominant focus on media ownership and control, and from labour histories written from a traditional class perspective which has not always looked for the threads of gender. While gendered divisions of labour persist in media industries, media forms also constitute a new sphere of ‘work’ that reflect and refract historical shifts in categories of gender.

The approach taken in this issue builds on deep historical processes brought to light by feminist labour histories: that the gendered nature of paid work outside the home in the 20th century was perhaps a temporary arrangement rather than an enduring situation, as noted by Sharpe and Bradley (1998). They point to the ‘conflicts and negotiations inherent within the gendered nature of contemporary employment practice … [underlying] urgent interest in the history of the gendering of work’ (Sharpe and Bradley, 1998: 2–3). A recent resurgence in the gendered histories of media institutions (e.g. Collie et al., 2013) has perhaps been in response to these absences as well as the ‘cultural turn’, in which work and labour issues were often downplayed in pursuit of questions of female spectatorship and gendered readings of media texts. New methodologies have incorporated biography (Murphy, 2016; Seaton, 2004) and drawn on scholarship in the ‘history of emotions’ in order to bring to light the creativity of the individuals involved in the ‘hidden labour of production’ (Hendy, 2012: 362). Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the ‘gendered gaps’ in media history (Moseley and Wheatley, 2008) and the particular challenges associated with attempting to uncover the voices and stories of women involved in media production, due to ‘implicitly gendered archiving and cataloging practices which have obscured or marginalised’ women’s participation (Ball and Bell, 2013: 551). Several contributors to this issue have relied on sources outside state-sponsored archives, particularly private papers and oral histories, in order to illuminate women’s experiences.

Transformations of media work

Media industries seen through the lens of human geography appear under tension from without and within, as transnational firms have used international out-sourcing to intensify ‘pressure on the powerful media unions to reduce their wage demands, alter compensation packages, and loosen work rules’ (Christopherson, 2006: 740). Recent work on precarity in both academic and commercial media sectors has highlighted how ‘contingent and short-term labor contracts hinder women’s employment opportunities and expand the gender pay gap’ (Benson-Allott, 2013: 120). Outside these sectors, Cohen (2012) has argued that alternative media production should also be problematised from a labour perspective. She outlines how the corporate media industries are subsidised by the unpaid work undertaken within alternative media, through training aspiring workers. Cohen (2012) also argues that commercial media industries appropriate the ‘labour of love’ discourses often used to frame alternative and community-based media work as non-labour, and therefore as non-commodifiable (pp. 224–225).

These developments speak to important questions about the unpaid aspects of digital labour, generated within journals such as Feminist Media Studies (Arcy, 2016; Duffy, 2015; Gill, 2011) and Sociological Review (Conor et al., 2015). This scholarship has built on Gill’s (2002) and McRobbie’s (2010) earlier, feminist inflected, work on the connections between exploitation and entrepreneurialism in contemporary media sectors. Jarrett’s (2014) analyses of consumer labour have argued for ‘the (re)placing of feminist thinking and women’s experience at the forefront of contemporary understandings of labor’ within both informal and formal digital media sectors (pp. 26–27; see also Proctor-Thomson, 2014). Furthermore, she has characterised the unpaid labour of digital era as reproducing the invisible labour of the domestic sphere in what she terms the figure of the digital housewife (Jarrett, 2016).

The blurred boundaries of such mediated work speak to forced choice of the ‘mumpreneur’ (Foley, 2016), a term used to describe the rising numbers of self-employed women who, finding their options limited in a labour market (still) structured around a male breadwinner model, escape the constraints of the workplace and gendered careers to become mini-media moguls. Enabled by networked, privatised social media infrastructures, such as Facebook, the ‘mumpreneur’ is a gendered figure of neoliberalism par excellence: employer, worker, salesperson, advertising creative and media creator in one. As we argue, these recent manifestations of gendered work need historical inquiry to be adequately understood. The rapid domestication of computer technologies that enable home-based media work requires rethinking within the profound economic shifts that have engendered flexible and unclear boundaries between public and private spheres. In this way, the kinds of labour described by Abidin and by Gleeson in this issue intersect with the earlier studies of scholars such as Cassidy (2001), who, in her work on the gendered representations of work and computers within the domestic sphere during the 1990s, sought to expose ‘the inadequacies of postfeminism and the need to revisit sexual politics at home’ (p. 45). In this vein, we encouraged contributors to explore media representation and production as being intimately connected, rather than separate stages of linear economic cycles.

Overview of themes

This special issue brings together researchers who are uncovering previously invisible histories with contemporary research examining gendered working lives. The issue’s focus on gendered labour seeks to offer a new perspective on the kinds of work that are central to media industries: the diverse symbolic and transformative activities that are implicated in the recognition of gender as a social category.

In this issue, we wanted to bring historical perspectives to bear on contemporary debates, and to look at how media work has changed, and developed in relation to new economic formations. Contributors explore the role of gendered labour within media industries and institutions, both historically (Anderson, Darian-Smith, Andrews, McDonald, Murphy) and currently, by looking at social media as tools for organising around gender-based issues (Gleeson), as well as the forms of ‘visibility labour’ undertaken by young women in a post-mass media world (Abidin). Our contributors are also interested in how gendered work is mediated, and how this plays out for shifting configurations and representations of power and masculinities (Barnett, Waterhouse-Watson).

Kate Murphy reveals the unusually progressive attitudes towards the employment of women in the early years of the BBC, propelled by modernity, innovation, independence from state control and a commitment to public service. Three women attained Director status in the postwar period, and others achieved significant positions of influence in diverse areas including features, women’s talks and science, where they were often responsible for broadening the appeal and scope of programmes. Murphy tells a new kind of organisational history, whereby the life trajectories of women employees are inextricably linked to the evolution of the institution. She establishes the pivotal role played by women in the BBC’s development, while also discerning the seeds of change that would lead to women being pushed out by an increasingly masculinised and conservative BBC and the creation of discriminatory practices that would become entrenched by the 1970s.

Kylie Andrews also takes a biographical approach, drawing on organisational records and memory sources to expose the workplace cultures and entrenched sexual division of labour in the ABC in the postwar period. At a time when most women in the ABC were placed into support roles defined by ‘feminine’ characteristics, four senior female production staff were able to overcome gendered expectations and bring about change in two distinct ways: by becoming leading content creators in the male dominated area of public affairs, or by challenging the marginalisation and trivialisation of women’s issues from within ‘women’s programming’. By examining the position and treatment of women across radio and television, Andrews demonstrates the ongoing systemic issues within the institution.

Willa McDonald contributes to feminist cultural memory through her profile of the outstanding Australian print journalist Margaret Jones, who escaped the confines of the women’s pages in the postwar period to become a successful foreign correspondent in China and Europe. The exceptional nature of Jones’ career lays bare the deeply ingrained sexism in Australian journalism, which led to most women struggling to escape the low-status work associated with the women’s pages – a situation that did not significantly change until the 1980s. Jones’ success was not only due to her undeniable talent, McDonald argues, but to Sydney Morning Herald editor John Pringle and his creation of new opportunities for women journalists. McDonald redresses the lack of attention in the historiography of Australian journalism to women’s experiences, which as she points out, reflected their marginal position in the workplace.

Fay Anderson takes a fresh look at the relationship between the media and crime, through her examination of the work of the newspaper photographers who covered one of the most famous cases in Australian history: the disappearance of the infant Azaria Chamberlain in 1980 from Uluru in the Northern Territory, and the subsequent wrongful conviction for murder (and eventual acquittal) of her mother Lindy Chamberlain. By drawing on a significant collection of oral history interviews with newspaper photographers, Anderson provides an important new dimension to understandings of the relationship between media coverage and public opinion. She considers how the photographers’ routines, relationships, and industrial structures and conditions, influenced the kinds of images taken. Anderson also analyses the representation of Lindy Chamberlain within the context of a masculine press culture, and prevailing ideas about female deviance and motherhood.

Kate Darian-Smith explores the relationship between gendered production cultures and forms of representation. Her work, drawn from the same body of oral history interviews with Australian press photographers as Anderson, presents new insights into the changing work culture of newspapers through personal accounts of male and female press photographers. The article provides important context to the revolutionary, yet still marginal, appointments of women as news photographers from the 1970s to 1990s. The experiences of these female photographers, including Lorrie Graham, Julia Featherstone, Verity Chambers and Penny Stephens, highlight clashes between work practices that stemmed from the all-male, craft-based press darkroom and affirmative action within media industries in the wake of second-wave feminism. Darian-Smith shows how these conflicts were negotiated in the workplace and on photographic field assignments as well as in the reception of the published work of these photographers.

In the first of two articles focusing on media representations of masculine labour, Chelsea Barnett interrogates the relationship between work, middle-class masculinity and national identity in the cultural sphere of postwar Australia, through close examination of the 1954 film King of the Coral Sea. The national ideals of ‘entrepreneurship and innovation’, as expounded by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, are embodied particularly in the character of pearl-shell diver Ted King, played by the quintessential working-class actor Chips Rafferty, who in the film represents the potential for class mobility. Barnett demonstrates the ways that film not only circulates, but produces, historically contingent understandings of masculinity, class and race. Barnett’s exploration of the ways that masculinity and work have been represented in the media demonstrates the potential of this approach, and media-historical research’s relevance to unpacking contemporary definitions of work and gender.

Deb Waterhouse-Watson builds on her previous work on the representation of sexual assault by Australian footballers (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013) to identify a shift in discourse in media coverage of sport. She finds that, despite the professionalisation of Australian football codes since the 1980s, a discourse of football as ‘beyond work’ exists. This discourse is problematic, she argues, because it provides a logic of exception which prevents the recognition of their off-field behaviour as criminal. The link between a hyper-masculine form of labour – elite sport – and the legitimation of sexual assault is detailed by Waterhouse-Watson in her analysis of newspaper coverage of the case of Australian Football League (AFL) player Andrew Lovett surrounding allegations of rape in 2009–2010. Waterhouse-Watson’s research on press coverage demonstrates that the framing of footballers’ status as transcending mundane notions of work provides ‘a logical framework’ that excuses players from sanctions and legitimates lenient treatment. This case study raises the troubling inequalities of contemporary gendered labour: the hypervisibility of masculine achievement in mediatised sport and the enduring invisibility of feminised, unpaid domestic labour.

The gendering of online labour is documented and analysed by Jessamy Gleeson in the context of feminist activism that seeks to challenge sexist representations in mainstream Australian media. Drawing on interviews with moderators of these campaigns, she reflects on current debates about the nature of labour in contemporary society. She interrogates the notions of ‘digital’ and ‘free’ labour, demonstrating the immense costs that taking on moderating roles have at a personal level for these women. Her participants’ accounts of day-to-day routines and skills involved in editing the campaign sites illustrates the ways in which such labour is essential to the contemporary public sphere, yet is highly undervalued and escapes existing understandings of employment in media industries. Because such work is much closer to unpaid labour practices exemplified in social movements, it speaks to the increasing intersection of media and civil society. In this way, her work provokes us to rethink gendered conceptualisations of work and politics.

The work of instagrammers explored in Crystal Abidin’s article on ‘visibility labour’ pushes these boundaries between media representation and production even further, and illustrates the ways in which the work of consumption is spectacularised in social media. Abidin argues that these kinds of practices represent a new, unstable form of work – visibility labour – that accumulates attention in what has become a highly gendered cultural form, Outfit of the Day (#OOTD). Her analysis challenges existing understandings of work and media, while pointing out how these new formations of selves and commodities reinforce gender norms. The gendered labour of such ‘influencers’ reproduces a feminised, atomised public that stands in contrast to the feminist collective models documented by Gleeson.

This issue took shape in conversations that took place at a workshop hosted by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University in February 2016. Questions and issues thrown up by the workshop included the challenges for women working in the media, and the links with women’s work in general, as well as the kinds of feminisation that has been taking place in the mainstream media industries since the decline of profitability and viability of existing financial models. As part of the workshop, a panel of women leaders in the media industry spoke of the difficulties they have experienced raising issues relating to gender and work, both within the workplace and in the media. One of the panellists characterised this difficulty as stemming from a feminisation and class characterisation of such topics. She attributed these blind spots as stemming from a form of masculinity in the workplace that is damaging to both men and women.

With these provocations in mind, we believe that more work needs to be done on the media framing of paid and unpaid work in both historical and current contexts, as well as critical events and moments in women’s employment in media industries. The opportunities offered to women by new media spaces, particularly in podcasting, are ripe for scholarly investigation (McHugh, 2016). Beyond the scope of this issue was detailed discussion of media representations of disputes and struggles in female-based industries, as well as historical accounts of women’s work in particular programmes and sectors. We also were unable to include works that consider intersectionality and the convergences of gender, class and racialisation in working lives in media industries. We hope that other scholars find this intervention useful and look forward to continuing these debates within the pages of Media International Australia and beyond.