Unwelcome Gender Politics p. 13

By: M.L. Stein

Female panelists say it still pervades newsrooms
DESPITE THE HUGE influx of women into the nation's media in recent years, gender politics of the unwelcome kind still pervades the newsroom, according to female panelists at a Los Angeles convention.
Their complaints ranged from patronizing and insulting remarks by male editors to female staffers to the tendency of newspapers generally to omit women in contacting "expert" sources for stories or editorial page matter.
In the panel discussion at the convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, Sharon Stewart, a Long Beach, Calif., Press-Telegram editorial writer, said she experienced discrimination when she worked at another metropolitan paper, "but I never knew whether it was because I was black or female."
On one occasion, Stewart recalled, a letter of reprimand was placed in her file because the company car she was driving on assignment broke down.
"It didn't have oil but I didn't think I was responsible for maintenance of company automobiles," she said. Stewart contrasted the reason for her punishment with that of a male staffer who, without permission, drove a company car to Vermont.
"He also got a letter in his file for something I thought was a lot more serious," the panelist commented.
On another occasion, Stewart related, she was told by fellow employees that a white editor said he liked his coffee "as black as Sharon's tits." Stewart said she filed a bias lawsuit against the newspaper over that incident and others, which was settled out of court. The agreement, she disclosed, included an upgrade in her assignments and a pledge by the paper to hire more minority editorial staff persons.
Amy Pyle, an assistant city editor in the Valley edition of the Los Angeles Times, cautioned against reacting too quickly over perceived gender discrimination.
She offered as an example a male editor who called her "kiddo" on her first day as a reporter on the paper.
"It upset me but then I learned he called everyone kiddo," Pyle said. "It was just his way of speaking."
"It's important not to overreact," Pyle continued. "The key for women is to recognize when something is important enough to take action."
When she first joined the Valley edition, Pyle said, all the managers were males, giving the newsroom a "frat-house atmosphere. There were no checks or balances and this sometimes affected news judgment."
She cited the reaction of an editor to a story involving a woman in a police case. "What was she doing out with six children 11 o'clock at night?" the editor reportedly commented.
Pyle said women staffers "collectively took action" to get more females on the city desk to provide a better balance in news judgment.
At her first job in television, said Sandra Gin, a Chinese-American, her male boss asked, "Do you cook Chinese?"
That was 15 years ago. Today Gin is an executive producer at WGGT-TV in Greensboro, N.C., where the general manager, station manager and sales manager are women.
"They have brought a whole new culture into management," Gin noted. She observed that when women are given supervisorial roles in a station, "some men don't how to deal with it. The idea is to use a tactic that is non-threatening to them, although I'm not sure I always succeed at this. I'm not a man so I can't get into their minds."
Peter Bhatia, managing editor of the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, said he believes progress is being made in eliminating gender discrimination, "but I for one am not satisfied with the rate or pace of the progress and believe all of us must be vigilant in the quest."
Bhatia, who was recently promoted to executive editor of the Fresno (Calif.) Bee in the McClatchy newspaper group, said that on the Sacramento Bee women run the city desk, news desk, copy desk and art department. In addition, the paper has three female columnists, one of them a Latina, and women on major beats. This has meant, Bhatia said, that the Bee is publishing more women's-interest stories in the main news section on such issues as health, family, lifestyle and children.
However, he warned newspaper managers that in hiring women and minorities "there will be failures" for which the managers must accept responsibility. Some appointments, he predicted, will end up as mistakes.
Hiring and promoting women and minorities, Bhatia said, is not only the right thing to do, "it has a sound economic footing for our industry."
Stewart said newspapers have a long way to go in broadening their coverage to close the "gender gap."
"Why is there a great disparity in the coverage of women's health issues in the nation's newspapers?" she asked. "Why aren't 50% of the expert sources we contact for stories or editorials women? Why are stories on parenting, children, and caregiving seen more as traditional women's issues and relegated to the family pages rather than the front pages? Why is it that when a woman becomes a publisher, executive editor or city editor, she is still a 'pioneer'?"
Stewart said the answers to those questions are tied to gender politics in the newsroom, "where the complex relations between men and women are much larger than the newsrooms themselves. They stretch to embrace our entire society."
She rated the Press-Telegram as being ahead of most newspapers in placing women in decision-making roles but said female reporters have complained about the absence of women columnists and that male management appears to have a network outside the office that excludes women.
This, she continued, involves male reporters and editors lunching together, playing poker "and consequently developing a camaraderie that exudes maleness."
"What difference does it make if women are in charge if that paper's coverage doesn't differ from the herd journalism of a predominately male-run newspaper?" Stewart asked.
Some 500 AAJA members and others attended the convention, which also drew employment recruiters from nearly 60 news organizations. They included the Associated Press, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Detroit Free Press, Dow Jones & Co., the New York Times, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press.