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By Carol Jenkins / July 16, 2008
The Women’s Media Center advocates the inclusion of women’s voices and perspective at every level in the media, including the op-ed pages. When we speak with editors about the glaring absence of women from the opinion pages, we invariably hear variations on a common question: Is the problem one of supply or demand?
Editors often point to their e-mail inbox to show that the hurdle lies with women, who account for a smaller percentage of op-ed submissions than men. Ruth Marcus, one of two female staff columnists at the Post, believes it is women’s reluctance to speak out, rather than “male chauvinist editors.” It’s a variation on what the Brookings Institution calls the “ambition gap.”
However, we agree with Ms. Howell, whose analysis of the Post’s op-ed imbalance blamed the numbers on the “tradition” of hiring white men to write and the failure of more women and people of color to submit. Overall, the figures on women syndicated opinion writers have been locked under 25 percent for years now. At the Post, 17 of their 19 weekly or biweekly columnists are men. This pattern is repeated in many major publications in the United States.
It’s important to make this distinction between the writers a newspaper hires to give their take on the world and those people who may submit an op-ed or two a year on subjects in their area of expertise. [Editor's note: The Christian Science Monitor's Opinion page does not have columnists. Women account for 30 percent of oped contributors so far in 2008.]
A publication’s staffed opinion writers’ pool is a better instrument to judge its fairness, its dedication to diversity. A paper’s roster of staff writers reflects its assessment of who is qualified to interpret the world. Using that rule, we must deduce that mainstream media believe men to be far more capable of analytical, reasoned thought. The responsibility for hiring smart, gifted writers of both sexes and all colors and viewpoints belongs to the editors – and it is their failure when they don’t.
But the problem goes beyond the bylines. The dismal representation of women on the op-ed pages is just the tip of the iceberg. Research from the Annenberg Public Policy Institute found that just 3 percent of the “clout” positions – the owners, publishers, and other ultimate decisionmakers – are women. The net effect of this is that almost everything we know about our world is cast through the male perspective. Women are just beginning to catch on to this fact.
This lopsided state of affairs was one of the reasons the WMC was created. Through our Progressive Women’s Voices program, our participants are given rigorous training that enables them to write and place opinion pieces in major newspapers.
We’re not the only ones. The White House Project’s SheSource.org program, the dedicated OpEd Project, the National Women’s Editorial Forum, and Women’s eNews all also tackle the supply problem by equipping women with the tools and confidence to submit op-eds. These organizations also play an important role in reminding editors and executives of the importance of women’s voices on the opinion pages.
As long as editors can look in their inboxes and see that the men are writing and submitting at a higher rate than women, they can avoid tackling the institutional imbalances that perpetuate at the highest levels of media. Women have a responsibility to write and submit to the op-ed pages, to be a part of the national political debate.
But that isn’t the whole story. Until editors, publishers, and owners demonstrate that they value women’s voices and perspectives by hiring women as top-level decisionmakers and regular commentators, women will continue to look at newspaper opinion pages as a medium that does not speak to or for them.
• Carol Jenkins is the president of the Women’s Media Center. She is an Emmy award winning former television anchor and correspondent, known for her tenure with WNBC-TV in New York.
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FROM FEMINIST.COM/RH REALITY CHECK
WMC President Carol Jenkins on Kristof/WuDunn Book
Women’s Media Center President Carol Jenkins joins a host of other notable commentators on Kristof & WuDunn’s new book, “Half The Sky,” running this week on RH Reality Check, a UN-funded, award-winning, progressive, online publication covering global reproductive and sexual health news. The series is called “Women Need Rights, Not Rescue.” Other contributing authors include Edwin Okong’o of New America Media, Yifat Susskind and Diana Duarte of MADRE, Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check and Pandragon, Ariel Doughtery of the Media Equity Collaborative and more. Below is Carol’s piece, reprinted.
Half the Sky—Here in America, Too
I find the conversation surrounding the publication of Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, illuminating. The NYTimes’ devotion of an entire issue of its magazine to the book’s publication provoked responses of all kinds, including a certain consternation that it took a man’s work on the issue to convert the Times folks into believers. Those of us advocating for women in media find this to be generally true: even if the subject is women, media executives would rather hear about it from a man.
That said, I am now reading the full book, and find it to be an extremely valuable instrument to help us think through girls, women, poverty, and sexual exploitation—and how we can be truly useful going forward. Sheryl and Nick have found, in the stories of individual girls and women, a way for us to understand the deprivation of millions. They spell out the work of organizations small and large to get us thinking about what we might do. Over the weekend on his blog, Nick took up again the issue of menstruation and its impact on school attendance of girls in developing countries. It is something so elemental that we might not even think of it as a true barrier to education, to eventual economic stability.
Mostly through my work as a board member of AMREF (The African Medical Research Foundation ) I see first hand the gaping needs in developing countries. We are the largest African Health organization on the continent—we train 10,000 community health workers a year—and despite our successes, fistula, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS are still with us.
I have interviewed women and girls in Africa: brutally raped women in post-war Liberia– and school girls who escaped The Lord’s Liberation Army in northern Uganda, haunted by the people they’d killed, to simply stay alive. In Madagascar it is the sexual exploitation of small children that concerns me. The problem of foreigners flying in to have sex with impoverished children six and younger is so prevalent, that the airlines hand out flyers warning that “Children are not the souvenirs of tourists!”
But as committed as I am to working in the developing world, I have a couple of thoughts about hearts breaking right here at home. We have our own invisibles: they are mostly women of color, particularly black women with staggering infant mortality and maternal mortality rates, lack of insurance, heightened death from breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Illness and early death– and permanent residence in the bottom rung of our so-called economic ladder– make for an endangered group right here in our midst.
It is a group we need to keep in mind, because you won’t see us very much in the media—home bred women of color don’t have the exotic appeal of grand international rescue missions. But there are many of us who believe that black women in America are now in full blown crisis, and require a concerted effort of activists, philanthropists, big thinkers. Black women’s voices are largely missing from our debate about health care, even as the disparities in their care are the starkest.
And so we come to the crucial piece in all of this: media. Many take this essential brick of our democracy for granted—or see it primarily as a dispassionate information tool for the privileged. Around the world, and right here at home, we need to think of media as essential as a blood transfusion: life giving and life saving. It’s why we work so hard at The Women’s Media Center to make sure women get to tell the stories.
Last January, in Monrovia, Liberia, I visited the fistula repair unit at John F. Kennedy Hospital. Here I met very young women who through rape or unattended childbirth had been essentially torn apart, then ostracized by their families. These patients cried and sang laments of abandonment—but the surgery, and rehabilitation afterwards, would restore them. Almost every woman on this brink of recovery had heard about the surgery on the UN radio station, in her own dialect. Media as transfusion.
As we consider the rich global view Nick Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn have given us—let’s see what examples are in their work to restore the lives of the women of color here in our own country.
Carol Jenkins is the president of The Women’s Media Center and board member of AMREF/USA.
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Yesterday, the report that FCC Chair Kevin J. Martin was rushing into a vote on media consolidation, loosening the rules on cross-ownership of television stations and newspapers, was alarming and wholly unacceptable. We cannot allow control of the media, especially our publicly owned airwaves, to be held by a handful of men.
This is not an abstract question about ownership rights or corporate conglomerates. This is about the image of the world we see every day as reflected in the mirror of the media. Today, that picture is overwhelmingly selected and created by men. Women, who comprise nearly 52 percent of the population, own less than 3 percent of radio and television stations. Not coincidentally, women hold the same proportion percent of clout positions in the media. Fully 97 percent of the decision makers in the newsroom, the publishing house and the studio lot are men.
As a result, the image that we see of the world as reflected by the media is dangerously incomplete. Far too often, women’s stories and women’s experiences go unreported or underreported. And as Women’s Media Center founder and activist Jane Fonda said, when the media does not reflect the vibrant diversity of the people on this planet, both the quality of journalism and the quality of our democracy suffer.
Certainly media consolidation plays a part in this. Since deregulation in 1996, as male-owned and -run companies have bonded with other male-owned and -run companies, women chase the ever-elusive prize: no matter how high a woman rises, it seems ever more levels of power are erected above her. As cross-ownership becomes the norm, and entertainment companies are responsible for newsrooms, the trickle down effect of exclusion asserts itself in those newsrooms, the most important connection and responsibility to the public.
On April 30, 2007, I testified [PDF] at one of several FCC hearings held on the topic of media ownership. At that hearing, I found that the idea that women have an important and distinct stake in this discussion seemed to come as a surprise to FCC representatives. That is probably why almost all key speakers were men and why the few women present addressed a nearly empty audience. Nevertheless, I, and many of my colleagues throughout the women’s movement, spoke out against the threat that further erosion of media ownership rules poses to our democracy.
The bottom line is that there is a crisis of representation in the media and this is where FCC attention should lie. If you agree, please speak up and let the FCC know.
On behalf of this country’s Invisible Majority, the Women’s Media Center opposes FCC Chair Kevin J. Martin’s reported plan to loosen media ownership. The proposed rules do nothing to include women and minorities, and until they do, should be opposed.
