The feminist movement is widespread and has led to research on almost every aspect that can be considered unfair to one gender or the other. One of the central topics for feminist study is the media. A Google search of feminist media theories lists more than 25,000 scholarly publications produced just in the past ten years, and this does not include the multitude of
29 book chapters also dedicated to the topic. Feminist activists see the media as a powerful tool that can be used to challenge or support gender stereotyping in the community. The founder of the long-running Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), Margaret Gallagher, explained that the significance of women in media is based on the ―distribution of narrative resources‖ (GMMP, 2010, p iii), whereby girls develop an image of themselves based on media portrayals that are not influenced by women, and the GMMP builds on previous research:
For decades, feminist scholars and activists have focused attention on the cultural dimensions of power, and the media‘s role in reproducing particular patterns of gender inequality (ibid.).
Early GMMP research was a simple quantitative statistical analysis of global media based on content analysis. Over the years this further developed with qualitative analysis to focus more on what it sees as evidence of the underlying media industry‘s culture and its slowness to change (GMMP, 2000). GMMP aimed to keep the spotlight on media production in an attempt to help change the practices of the news media. The same goal to change the existing media underpinned research in Pamela Creedon‘s three books on gender and the media published over the past 30 years. In the most recent edition, Creedon and Cramer (2007) shifted the study‘s emphasis away from simply exploring the media, and instead towards developing possible solutions. The authors‘ mission is what they termed Transformative Feminism, which is the goal of transforming the existing media system to one that is less based on gender stereotypes.
30 Research on mainstream media, such as the GMMP and Creedon (1989; 1993), has not always fitted comfortably into mainstream feminist theory, as these writers focused on the existing media industry and other feminists felt the industry was too hegemonically masculine to ever change. Some feminist theorists considered previous research ignored the gender exploitation of mass communication, and thereby that research accepted the male- style culture as normal. These writers urged feminist researchers to put gender as the centre of their focus (Miller & Treitel, 1991). The postmodern feminist ideology likewise criticised research that constructed an impersonal narrative that made no attempt to ―challenge the relations of dominance‖ (Lather, 1991. p. 52). Some feminist media researchers expounded the fruitlessness of working within an existing system, which was deemed a male paradigm no matter how many female employees were involved (Baehr, 1981). Radical feminist theorists espoused the view that women‘s oppression would not be cured by a social revolution. This body of thought ―rejects as an end goal equality for woman in the existing social structures‖ (Cirksena, 1987, p. 19), and sees media companies as having an ingrained sexism and being unable to change. This paradigm tended to build a schism between radical feminist researchers and gender media researchers who theorised that a more efficient methodology was changing the environment within the existing industry (Gallagher, 1981).
Since the 1980s, research has continued to focus on the existing media, and feminist media theorists have developed a more complete body of knowledge of the journalism culture. Researchers such as Creedon and Cramer, as well as Byerly (2004), and Lavie (2004), have examined the media culture and described its gendered culture as unique, but at the same time they acknowledge it embodies some of the same problems at management level as other industries, commonly called the glass ceiling theory. They maintain that no matter what rules
31 and guidelines are put into place within a newsroom, women do not progress into management because of an invisible barrier that stops them, but allows entry to their male colleagues.
According to an Annenberg Public Policy Center (2003) report on women leaders, the ‗glass ceiling‘ is a term coined in 1981 by magazine editor Gay Bryant to describe the invisible barrier for women progressing past middle management. That same year the National Organisation of Women (NOW) adopted the term and publicised the problem of women attaining executive positions. NOW Chair Muriel Fox said the glass ceiling was a barrier in the middle of the career ladder, but was invisible and women ―cannot move beyond it without the women‘s movement‖ (McCormack, 1985, p. 1). Ten years later, the United States set up the Glass Ceiling Act in an attempt to curtail barriers for women and minorities obtaining top management positions (Falk & Grizard, 2003). A key element of the definition was that women rarely were able to progress up the career path, that they ―earned less than men, and they were prevented from gaining necessary experience for the positions‖ (ibid, p. 6). This definition is important to the conclusion of my study and will be discussed again later.
The facts were easy to ascertain, but the reasoning behind it was more difficult. The facts were that when the Glass Ceiling Act was enacted, female business graduates earned 12% less than their male colleagues in their first jobs and progressed slower up the career ladder (Castro, 1997). A decade later, female business graduates managers still earned less, with those being able to attain management level earning 27% less than their male colleagues (Catalyst, 2000). The Annenberg Public Policy Center reported that some researchers claimed that the glass ceiling was in place simply because men were better managers, but on
32 the other hand a large body of thought laid the blame on women‘s need to combine work and family responsibilities (Falk & Grizard, 2003). However, the Center was not convinced these two factors led to the glass ceiling preventing women progressing to executive positions. Instead, the Center concluded that the glass ceiling would remain intact until businesses took a positive step to remove it: ―Theories as to why the glass ceiling continues in corporate America are varied. Most research on the topic points to stereotypes, lack of efforts to recruit women, and lack of women in important pipeline positions‖ (p. 8).
The previous three sections outlined theories that form a framework for this study. The journalism culture theory presents a picture of the journalism workplace as being ingrained with practices that subtly prevent female journalists from competing on an equal field with male journalists. The embedded nature of the media‘s culture is well argued by Bourdieu (2005), Creedon (1993), Melin-Higgins (2004), and Ross (2004), as well as others. Tacit management theories, while developed by industrial psychologists and not applied to the journalism industry, offer some insights into how cultural practices may be perpetrated within the newsroom. Likewise the theory that a glass ceiling prohibits female employees attaining top management positions has been asserted by a broad range of industry researchers, not simply confined to media. With this theoretical framework in place, the literature review now considers the empirical studies that have investigated the place and progress of women in the news media industry.
33