Female journalists tend to cover education, health, lifestyle and religion, while male journalists tend to cover economics, politics, sports and technology. Is this evidence of discrimination?
The findings come from the Women’s Media Center, which aims to make “women visible and powerful in the media.” It does this through “media advocacy campaigns, media monitoring for sexism, creating original content, training women and girls to participate in media and promoting media experienced women experts,” according to its website.
The Center’s 2015 report, released Thursday, details the lack of women in journalism. The underlying impression is that this is a problem that needs to be remedied in order for women to achieve equality. The entire report appears to imply that discrimination — or the patriarchy — is to blame for there being fewer female journalists. It’s almost like the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math argument — that women are being held back due to sexism — but for journalism.
One particularly irksome section claims that “most women wrote about education, health and lifestyle; far fewer females covered economics, politics, sports, tech and other key assignments.” Is this an indication of a problem? Or evidence that women choose to write about different things than men.
My suspicion is the latter, but Julie Burton, president of WMC, told the Washington Examiner that media companies need to find out why the disparities exist.
“We hope that media companies that desire to have representative news coverage on all topics will investigate why women are so underrepresented in so many of the key assignments,” Burton wrote. “At the Women’s Media Center we would encourage media companies to go one step further and put in place policies and practices that will result in more representative coverage.”
When pressed on whether she believed a woman’s choice might have something to do with the disparity, Burton added: “The data is simply the data and the media companies themselves are in a better position to answer why the figures break down the way they do.”
I suspect the disparity has more to do with choice than discrimination. Media companies generally post a description of the kind of reporter (education, politics, etc.) they’re looking for during the hiring phase, so it’s not like a prospective employee is going into an interview blind.
But, hey, whatever it takes to attack the patriarchy, right?
