Change yourself before change the rule

Did the female journalists’ style of dress often attract more attention than the work they did?

Yes, indeed. women do get some problems.

They seldom have leading roles in journalism and get disproportionately little news coverage. Have you thought the possible reasons for this?

I have.

In the past two days, I prepared for a presentation about “women in media” which shed some new light on me actually.

According to the statistics from the European federation of journalism, the average number of women journalists in EU countries is almost equal to the number of men, but the growing number of women in leading positions is slow.

It seems that the situation of women in profession is becoming much better.

However, I found that gender discrimination, knowledge of the business, expectations of promotion, relationship with boss, different tastes in news, not enough training, unequal pay, more concern about family, traditional role patterns and sexual harassment are all the barriers for women to be happy with their job.

Are men more trustworthy?

According to “Female Leadership in US Newsrooms”, among all the participants in the survey 64% see their opportunity blocked identify management’s preference for the opposite sex — men — as standing in their way and men are more likely than women to claim knowledge of the business side of newspapers, and of libel and relevant legal issues.

The stories reserved for female journalists were soft ones which can be seen as an extension of their domestic responsibilities: in children and educational programmes; in consumer and domestic areas; in human interest and feature sections; in entertainment programmes, etc. In contrast, male journalists dominate in the hard news areas, such as international affairs, defence issues, national security and the like.

When something as serious as the 9/11 attacks occurs, women are not seen to have the necessary skills to investigate and report on them.

I do think it is a complicated question to answer as it is related to people’s deep-in-mind concept, men have more power while women are more vulnerable.

More than fair or unfair

Not every women is blocked by their counterpart, men.

Based on my research, many women don’t see their opportunity to be promoted and some just don’t want to.

One of the very important reasons is family, especially children.

Although nowadays women are not the machine to give a birth to a baby nor a slave to her husband any more, but they still be seen as the person who is entitled to have more responsibilities to nurture their family.

Some of them are even just willing to play the role like this.

My suggestion

So to me, how to reconcile the family and the job is still a cliché, men can get both family and well-paid job while women have to choose between them.

Referring to other solutions, I think offering special training to promote professional skills and gender issues is imperative. Setting up mechanism to put related law across, promoting rights and social protection of women, improving public daycare, i.e adjusting school hours for working parents.

Last but not the least, to women in profession, change yourself before change the rule is much more crucial.