The Editor Gender Gap
Posted on Friday, November 29, 2019 at 10:35 PM
Women make up 51 percent of the voices in the US, yet they continue
to be the minority in the media industry.
By Denise Gable
In
spite of progress made in past years, men still dominate US media. Not
only do they outnumber women in reporting and producing the news, they
also outearn them significantly.
According to a 2019 Folio:
survey headline, "Male Editors (Still) Significantly Out-Earn Females."
Total compensation for male magazine editors-in-chief averages $108,000,
while their female counterparts receive $90,000.
Level of
education also affects salary level. Chief editors with advanced
degrees, for example, average $106,000 compared to $91,000 for those
with undergraduate degrees. But even at the largest English-language
newspapers, only 27 percent of the editors have advanced degrees,
according to Columbia Journalism Review. Data USA points out,
however, that in the working population those with advanced degrees
represent almost twice the percentage of relevant degrees awarded by the
universities. In other words, advanced degrees are shown to be
advantageous.
Interestingly, the Poynter Institute reported in
2017 that "women dominate journalism schools, but newsrooms are still a
different story." Poynter adds, "Each year, women comprise more than
two-thirds of graduates with degrees in journalism or mass
communications, and yet the media industry is just one-third women, a
number that only decreases for women of color, reports show."
Data
USA backs up that disparity. It reports that at the five top journalism
schools, 67.9 percent of graduates are female.
Poynter offers
this anecdote: "[Journalist] Margaret Sullivan remembered standing in
front of a class of Northwestern University journalism students. She
noticed the difference there from the newsroom meetings she had led in
previous years. Her class of 20 had just three or four men. But in her
decades-long career as a journalist and editor, she had become
accustomed to news meetings with a dozen men and, at best, one other
woman."
Some attribute this disparity to the impact of job
demands upon traditional household responsibilities. The International
Journalists' Network newsletter comments, "Journalism requires long
hours and often large assignments that can pull a journalist away from
their family often enough to upset a balanced home life. Women are being
asked to choose between their careers and their children or starting a
family. Editors and fellow journalists who ask them to choose, or shun
them for not 'choosing' journalism, are failing mothers in the newsroom."
There
is an interesting statistic concerning online editing. An ASNE survey
shows that the number of women employed at online-only publications is
disproportionately high, whereas the Folio: survey indicates that
top editors of digital-only publications earn far more than counterparts
at publications that are either print-only or both. There's no clue as
to how that divides out on a gender basis.
Another gender
differentiation can be seen in article bylines. A Slate headline
asserts, "The Lack of Female Bylines in Magazines Is Old News." The
solution? "If you really want more women writers, get more women
editors," the deck says. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg
agrees with this thought process: "The more women there are in
leadership, the easier it is for women to be in leadership."
The
Slate article's author, Katha Pollitt, asserts that "editors
matter." She explains by example: "At the Atlantic,
where just 26 percent of 2010 articles were by women, of the top seven
editors, only the managing editor is a woman. (Women are often managing
editors, a position with lots of work and not much power.) Of the 12
editors listed at the top of the New Republic's masthead, only
two are women. One of these women is the executive editor, the other is
a senior editor." Pollitt adds, "It's naive to think that the fact that
most top editors are men isn't part of the story."
At VIDA:
Women in Literary Arts, Amy King sums things up: "We know women write.
We know women read." She says it is important to ask why those facts
aren't reflected in gender equity.
Denise Gable is managing
editor of Editors Only.
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