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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