Glass Ceiling
A new study on the place of women in the UK media industry suggests that three quarters of editors and reporters working on national newspapers are men.

The study found that 33 per cent of editors are women and, perhaps more surprisingly, just 30 per cent of reporters on the nationals are women.

A global survey published last year found that 37 per cent of reporters across TV, radio and print were women and just 36 per cent in the case of online journalism. Journalism is not the only industry where women are in a minority in senior positions. According to a UK Equality and Human Rights Commission report, they hold just 11 per cent of FTSE 100 directorships.

But while women are in the minority in national newsrooms, the most recent survey of NCTJ journalism courses shows that 49 per cent of NCTJ journalism students were women.

That result is from 2002 – the study is only undertaken every 10 years – but Journalism.co.uk spoke to City University to get an up-to-date picture. Two thirds of applicants to journalism courses at City are female, with applications to the print journalism courses roughly 50:50.

So if equal numbers of men and women are training as journalists, why are fewer women making it to the national newsrooms?

Chair of the NUJ's equality committee Mindy Ran, who was involved in last year's global gender equality survey, said she believes there is a glass ceiling and that newsrooms are "anti-family friendly" due to unsociable hours.

Asked if she was surprised by today's finding, she said: "I was surprised by how low the number of female reporters is in the UK."

Ran believes women in their late-twenties and thirties become disillusioned. Speaking to Journalism.co.uk from her home in the Netherlands she said: "There is a problem when you look at young women aged 28 to 38. They grew up with high expectations and they have the ambition that they will really get somewhere, but when they find a glass ceiling, a lot of women just leave the industry."

Lis Howell (who has carried out research into gender inequalities in journalism), is director of broadcasting at City University. She told Journalism.co.uk that although she has no hard evidence, she believes men are favoured by employers.

"We've found that young men do marginally better quite quickly after entering the industry. It's anecdotal, but I have the feeling that men prefer to employ young men and older women prefer to employ young men too."

This recent study of national newspaper newsrooms was commissioned by Women in Journalism and launched at a special event last night.

Rowenna Davis, a committee member of Women in Journalism who led the research, said that one of the speakers, who did not want to be named, had witnessed bullying in the newsroom.

"I can't give any names as it's quite a difficult world to speak out in. This woman works in a quite senior position on a national paper and spoke of the extreme bullying of her colleagues. She described how many of her women friends have dropped off because they're not taken seriously. They're accused, if they get a good interview, it's because they've slept with the interviewee."

Davis, a freelance journalist, says she has been lucky. "I've worked across a number of papers, mostly as a freelancer, and I've been treated well during that time. But this research shows I haven't had the bad experiences that many women have had."

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