Gender in the News Media

      

                            From left to right: Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Patrick Soon-Shiong
                                               
In the middle of 2016, Forbes published a list of some of the richest billionaires who own US-based news media. Included on the list were Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, Michael Bloomberg, the founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P., Patrick Soon-Shiong, then the second largest shareholder in Tribune Publishing Company, and Rupert Murdoch, the executive co-chairman of 21st Century Fox and the chairman of News Corp. The people included in the list share one major feature: their gender. Most of the billionaires included on the list were also Caucasian, with a few exceptions like the aforementioned Soon-Shiong.

AAUW's earnings chart

The concentration of power based on gender should not come as a surprise, however, as it somewhat reflects overall societal trends. According to the American Association of University Women, in 2015, women working full time in the United States typically were paid just 80 percent of what men were paid. The AAUW states that women are expected to reach pay equity with men in 2059 if the rate in closing the gap between men and women follows the rate between 1960 and 2015. The organization also notes that if change continues at a slower rate seen since 2001, women will not reach pay equity with men until 2152. The pay gap is even worse for women of color. The distinct gap in pay, combined with past earning trends and the inheritance of old money, speaks volumes as to why men continue to exert hegemony over the news media.

Overall representation in terms of gender according to the WMC

The inequalities between gender representations in news media extend beyond higher leadership positions as well. The Women's Media Center's 2015 edition of their yearly study on the gender gap in news media (it should be noted that the data actually comes from 2014) states that, overall, men generated 62.1% of news while women generated 37.3%. This gap is a recurring theme in the study. For example, men represented 64.6% of supervisors in newspaper-based news media and 69.2% of all TV news directors. White men made up 55.59% of daily newspaper employees while white women made up 31.1%; minorities were even worse off in terms of representation. This results in men, especially white men, becoming the voice of the news media, decreasing the visibility of women and minorities in terms of the general public's perception of who makes the news. The patriarchal structure also puts news media outlets at risk of portraying androcentric viewpoints instead of concurrently relying on multiple diverse viewpoints.

Despite our society's slow progress towards gender equality, the news media is still plagued by inequality. Leadership positions in the news media are increasingly becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer, typically male, hands. As David Croteau et al. state in "The Economics of the Media Industry," this could lead to undue political and social influence. Their message can be taken a step further in light of the information covered in this post, by stating that the concentration and conglomeration of the news media in the hands of men lends undue political and social influence to men. This effect ranges from the top of the hierarchical chain to the bottom, covering positions ranging from CEOs to supervisors, reporters, and editors.