The Media Has a Woman Problem

By Liza Mundy

Saturday, April 26, 2014

WASHINGTON — THEY were, to a man, men. All were white; all in their 40s or thereabouts; most had dark hair. It was the mid-1990s, and I was interviewing at The Washington Post for the job of managing editor of the Sunday magazine. A morning of intimidating meetings with newsroom officials had given way to lunch with the magazine’s editors and elite staff writers.

Later, when these men became my friends and colleagues, I would realize they looked nothing alike. But at that moment, overwhelmed and self-conscious about not only my gender but also my credentials — I was working at an alternative weekly, in an era when free content was considered inferior and slightly seedy — my interlocutors appeared as one indistinguishable blur. As I answered questions about my philosophy of journalism, I worked to keep one fact straight: Who among them was named Peter (two were), and who was not?

It’s been 20 years, but things haven’t changed as much as we might expect. A new report by the Women’s Media Center found that male reporters still accounted for 63 percent of bylines in the nation’s top 10 papers and about the same proportion of newsroom staff. All but one of the individual winners of Pulitzer Prizes in journalism this year were male.

Men’s dominance in the field tends to be highest in prestige or “hard” topics like politics, crime, business, technology and world affairs; women put up better numbers in “soft” subjects like education, lifestyle, culture and health. Male opinion columnists outnumber women by more than two to one at The Wall Street Journal, more than three to one at The Washington Post, and five to one at The New York Times. As for sports — do you need to ask?

Men also represent authority and expertise in more subtle ways. On the front page of The New York Times, the study noted, men were quoted three times more often than women. When women were writing the stories, the number of women quoted went up.

What the report doesn’t answer is why this disparity persists, and why women are more equal in some sectors of journalism than in others. And even as newsrooms may be recruiting more women to hard-news beats, a new generation of big-name entrepreneurial ventures like Vox.com and FiveThirtyEight.com seem to be favoring the men.

As sobering as the numbers are for women in journalism, they are worse in some other fields. According to the National Science Foundation, women take 41 percent of science and engineering Ph.D.s. But they are less than a quarter of the STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — work force. For decades, nearly half of law students have been women, but while they make up 64 percent of staff lawyers they are just 17 percent of equity partners at top firms, according to the National Association of Women Lawyers. In all these fields, as on the Supreme Court, incumbency, or the sheer length of time people have occupied prime positions, is part of the story — but not all of it.

Newsroom culture — like that of politics, science or Big Law — is hard on family life. Political reporters — tied to campaign planes and the White House travel schedule — keep grueling hours. Foreign correspondents must coax spouses and children from global posting to global posting, a feat few women with children are able to pull off. But pointing this out is a long way from agreeing women are choosing the soft beats.

In a 2011 study, “The Cost of Workplace Flexibility for High-Powered Professionals,” the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz showed that in medicine, women had gravitated to specialties — internal medicine, ob-gyn, pediatrics, some surgical fields and veterinary medicine — where they could control their time.

But among the hardest-working journalists are party and society reporters, mostly women, who are constantly running to one late-night event after another. Fashion critics spend weeks at shows in Europe. And education reporters must cover late meetings. “My hours were horrible,” remembers Priscilla Painton, now the executive editor for nonfiction at Simon & Schuster (where she is my book editor), who covered the school board as a metro reporter early in her career. Conversely, some plum posts — magazine writer, op-ed columnist — permit a lot of flexibility. If this were all about schedule-related “choice,” why wouldn’t women dominate those jobs?

Because the closer you get to money and power, the more the writers look like the people they are covering. Vestiges remain of the culture evoked by Lynn Povich in “The Good Girls Revolt,” her terrific book about the sex discrimination suits filed in the 1970s at Newsweek and elsewhere.

When I came to Washington, some of the toughest places for women to get hired into were the prestigious publications like The Washington Monthly and The New Republic. According to VIDA, an organization that runs an annual tally of women’s representation in print, in 2013 men still dominated bylines in The New Republic by about three to one, and they outnumbered women at The Nation, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, too. Just a few months ago, the Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks (a colleague of mine at the New America Foundation) was the only female columnist out of more than 20 regular contributors to Foreign Policy. The editors have made an effort to recruit talented women, and the magazine now has 11 female contributors. Still, says Ms. Brooks, she regularly runs into TV hosts who say, “I would invite more women onto my show — if only there were any who were qualified!”

It’s all too easy to imagine hearing much the same in boardrooms and venture-capital firms as media moves in a digital direction. As the Reuters columnist — and my former boss — Jack Shafer has pointed out, major exponents of the new online brand journalism seem to be mostly male. Mr. Shafer calls them “marquee brothers”: journalists like Ezra Klein, Nate Silver and Glenn Greenwald, who land much-talked-about deals with deep-pocketed investors to run their own ventures. It can’t be a coincidence that just two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an all-male roster of speakers at a tech conference.

Yes, there are women leading or coleading some of these journalism start-ups — Laura Poitras at the Intercept, Melissa Bell at Vox, Kara Swisher at Re/code — but they’re not nearly as often the story. The rise of tech in media is playing as very much a guy thing.

As journalism expands beyond institutional newsrooms, deals are more easily made out of sight. The same is true in science, where women are far less likely than men to be invited to join lucrative corporate scientific advisory boards. Doors can open. But new kinds of doors can be closed.