Leading in a Different Language: Will Women Change the News Media?
Where Women Stand

The overall number of women journalists employed in the media around the world has decreased by 2 percent in the last five years, according to a recent study by the World Association for Christian Communication. Today, women are 41 percent of working journalists; they were 43 percent in 1995.

For all women employed in the media - which includes those working in administrative and support positions - the figures are even lower. The only international analysis of women's employment in the news media was conducted in 1995 by Margaret Gallagher for UNESCO. Gallagher's report, An Unfinished Story: Gender Patterns in Media Employment, found that in all regions of the world, women are not a significant part of the media workforce. In Asia women are 21 percent of the total media workforce. In Latin America they are 25 percent. In Southern Africa they are 27 percent. In Western Europe and the United States they are 35 percent.

In some countries, the figures for women in the media are astonishingly low. A Nepalese journalist speaking at the U.N. Beijing Plus 5 Conference in New York in June 2000 said that in her country, women are only 6 percent of media workers. According to UNESCO figures, in Japan women are only 8 percent of media employees; in India and Malawi they are 12 percent; and in Argentina and Mozambique women are 16 percent of the media workforce.

Worldwide, women are 79 percent of all part-time workers in the news media, wrote Gallagher in the 1995 report. Since part-time work is seldom an avenue to promotion, women in these positions rarely transition to full-time positions, much less leadership posts.

Since women are not represented in large numbers in the media in general, it is not surprising that there are even fewer women in high level positions in the media. The Radio-Television News Directors Association in the United States reports that women are 24 percent of news directors in television and 20 percent of those in radio. Similarly, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports that women are only 34 percent of newsroom supervisors in the United States.

According to the UNESCO report, in Africa women are 8 percent of broadcasting managers and 14 percent of managers in the print media. In Latin America, the figures are 21 percent for broadcasting and 16 percent for print. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of the respondents to an IWMF survey of women journalists in Latin America in September 2000 said that qualified and capable women in the media do not have equal opportunities to advance into leadership and management positions.

A majority (nearly 60 percent) of the women journalists from around the world who responded to a 1997 IWMF survey said that not even one out of 10 decision-makers in their companies were women. The figure was even higher (79 percent) for respondents from Asia. These findings support Gallagher's 1995 UNESCO report which found that women lead only 3 percent (8 out of 239) of the media organizations polled and hold a mere 12 percent of the top posts in those companies.