Women Underrepresented in Media Industries

NORTH MIAMI, FL – A new look at studies of women and media shows all communications industries are out of step with the U.S. population.

The extensive analysis of data by the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication at Florida International University covered the decade from 2005-2015 on the role and status of women in the nation’s major communications and journalism industries. The analysis indicates that women dramatically lag behind men in advertising, broadcast news, newspapers, magazines, online and digital media and public relations.

Some of the findings of the research indicate the following:

•  Women journalists’ salaries are 83 percent of what men earn, almost the same as a quarter century ago.
•  At the TV networks, women cover 37 percent of the news at NBC, 33 percent at ABC, and 28 percent at CBS.
•  Women hold only 23 percent of leadership positions in journalism and media.

Professor Judy VanSlyke Turk, research fellow of the Kopenhaver Center, will present the study results at 4 p.m., Wednesday, August 5, at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication International Convention at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. The media is invited to attend.

“The startling fact from compiling all the studies is that in the past decade media have largely ignored the very people who are their largest audience and buying public, women,” said Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver, Dean Emeritus and Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University, and Executive Director of the Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication. “When we started the study, we did not know how inadequate communications organizations are in providing balanced information, that is, information by and about women who make up more than half of the American population.”

Turk said, “This report will serve as the starting point upon which the Kopenhaver Center will base what we think will be the first research study to assess simultaneously the role and status of women across major communication and journalism industries, to include newspaper, magazine, broadcast (radio/television) news, online news, advertising and public relations.”

“This type of undertaking is precisely the kind of work the Center was founded to encourage. The next piece of this groundbreaking research multiphase project will be made available through the Center and will serve as a basis for our work to empower and prepare women for leadership roles in both professional and academic media work. Women have outnumbered men in enrollments in college media programs across the US since 1977 but their progress into leadership has not kept pace,” Kopenhaver said.

“This study addresses a long-standing question that until now has reached no consensus or conclusion,” Turk said. “Where are the women in the U.S. communication industries? Are they occupying leadership and management roles, and if not, where are they and what are they doing? This study reveals a void in any research available today that gives a cross-disciplinary snapshot, one that we’re determined to fill with a survey to be administered in late 2015 to professionals in all of these industries.”

This survey was made possible by funding provided by the Janet Chusmir Leadership Fellows Program in the Kopenhaver Center. Chusmir was the first woman editor of the Miami Herald and one of the first women editors of a major U.S. daily newspaper.

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Media Contact:

Carlos Folgar
EMAIL: cfolgar@fiu.edu