It’s raining men: The Press Awards nominations

Once again, the nominations for The Society of Editors Press Awards in the UK are heavily skewed towards one gender. It doesn’t reflect the make-up of our industry, and we really should have a long hard discussion among ourselves about why.

The Press Awards shortlist for 2015 came out yesterday, and one thing stood out very clearly. To stand a chance of winning an award, yet again it helped if you were a man. Just twenty nominees out of over 100 individuals short-listed are women.

It was immediately noted and commented on by several women on Twitter, and then Rich Symcox made this image which removed the men from the nominations list. It revealed very thin pickings indeed

It is dispiriting. Although at least as an industry we seem to have conceded that women can do interviews well.

It’s not like there is a secret cabal of lads in a gentlemen’s club somewhere twirling their moustaches bellowing “BWAH-HA-HA we’ve stopped the ladies winning again.” That’s not how it works in 2016.

But just as the whiteness of the Oscar nominees lists says not so much about the individual talents of the actors involved this year, but more about the wider decisions made about which films get funded, who gets cast in them, what gets the better marketing budget and more visibility in the media and so on, this is something we should be prepared to look at as an industry.

Effectively anybody in the UK can grow up wanting to be a journalist — meaning the intake into the industry could potentially simply reflect the demographics of the UK. Issues of class, race and ethnicity will play a part in making it harder for some people in the UK to get access into the media industry, but there is no obvious gender bar preventing people starting a career in journalism.

In fact, the opposite is true — between 2007 and 2014 there were consistently more women than men studying to get into journalism.

The fact that you can end up with an awards shortlist where men outnumber women nearly 6:1 in a field where more women than men are studying to enter should ring alarm bells.

A whole series of conscious and unconscious decisions across the industry contribute to an environment where it is harder for women journalists to progress into senior roles, and harder for them to get recognised.

Over the last few months I’ve had some really dismaying conversations with several talented journalists and developer/journalists who have either left, are in the process of leaving, or who are thinking about leaving journalism as a profession. All of them cited the way they are treated as women by the industry as a factor in their thinking. It worries me that I’m watching us gradually lose some of the best journalistic voices in the generation below me.

You’ll no doubt get some people saying that awards should be picked on merit alone, and that everybody on the shortlist — men and women — is a decent journalist and so on, but it strikes me that if you continually end up with a short list that skews so heavily towards one gender and not another, from an industry that doesn’t itself skew that way, you can’t be doing meritocracy at the top properly.

At a time when as an industry we all face an uncertain future, we should be doing all we can to retain our best talent. And constantly signalling to the women in our newsrooms that they will struggle to reach the pinnacle of the industry isn’t helping that.

UPDATE: A group of women journalists have set up their own awards as a response — “Words By Women”