In ‘The Post,’ Katharine Graham Offers a Wake-Up Call for Gender Equality in Journalism
By Rachel Heller
I left the opening night screening of Steven Spielberg’s journalism drama with a strange mix of emotions. It seemed to be a two-hour-long paradox: equal parts empowering, yet frustrating.
At its most inspiring, The Post is a tale of a boundary-pushing woman entrusted with the power to make history. At its most reflective, The Post is a wake-up call for the gender inequality that still plagues the journalism field.
The Post, based on real events, centers on Katharine Graham. In the film, Graham (Meryl Streep) becomes the publisher of The Washington Post — as well as the country’s first female publisher of a major newspaper — and releases the Pentagon Papers, exposing the U.S. government’s deception in the Vietnam War.
But this only scratches the surface of Graham’s story.
When it came time for Graham’s father to appoint someone to succeed him as the publisher of The Washington Post, he appointed her husband. His explanation was blunt: “You never want a man working for his wife.”
The sexist rationale in her father’s response proved to be prophetic. Once Graham’s husband died and the position was passed down to her, her male coworkers made no haste in fleshing out the blatant misogyny that seeped through her father’s words.
“Kay, people are concerned about having a woman in charge of the paper,” says a Washington Post board member (Bradley Whitford) to Graham in the film. While Whitford’s character is merely fictitious, he embodies the many real-life coworkers who doubted Graham’s leadership.
Graham recounts her frequent encounters with misogyny in her autobiography, Personal History. She expresses that The Washington Post “certainly operated in the old ways, assuming that white men were the chosen ones to run the business and edit the news.” Some of the newspaper’s executives “didn’t know how to deal with a woman in their midst — particularly a woman who controlled the company.”
Now, 55 years since Graham became acquainted with the sexism that’s packaged with female leadership, it would be easy for me to say that journalism has transformed into a level playing field. It would be gratifying to know that Graham’s battles against inequality have culminated into a brighter tomorrow.
Yet in an age where far too many female journalists are still earning less than their male coworkers, degraded in the workplace, and absent in leadership positions, I have to ask — when are we going to tackle journalism’s gender inequality?
According to a study from Indiana University, the average woman journalist during Graham’s era in 1970 would’ve earned 63% of the median income of men. The 21st century brought a substantial rise; in 2012, the wage gap between men and women journalists decreased by 20% since 1970.
I would never deny the triumph that’s reflected in these statistics. Progress is progress. Nevertheless, progress is simply inferior to the ultimate goal: equality.
Equality is exactly what Graham strived for. At the time of her rise to prominence as The Washington Post’s publisher, the plights of her and other women were reaching a climax with the second-wave feminist Women’s Movement.
Through her friendship with renowned feminist activist Gloria Steinem, Graham amassed a growing awareness for how her troubles with leading The Washington Post related to the troubles that other women were facing. According to an interview with Graham on the radio talk show Fresh Air, Steinem “argued with [her] about women’s positions and how [she] should understand them.”
Along with gender disparities in pay, harassment in the workplace is another critical issue that the Women’s Movement fought to combat. As floods of women in the 60s and 70s began to enter the workforce, the need to address the issue became increasingly urgent.
Decades after second-wave feminists took to the streets, shouting, “I am woman, hear me roar,” the degradation of female journalists and all other working women is (rightfully) still at the forefront of feminist conversation.
Ryan Lizza, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin — it seems that the interludes between announcements that a male journalist has been fired for sexual harassment are growing shorter and shorter.
The New York Times broke a bombshell sexual harassment story in late December of 2017. Through an investigation involving interviews with more than 100 current and former Vice Media employees, The Times found “four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees.”
One month later, Vice Media suspended president Andrew Creighton and chief digital officer Mike Germano due to sexual harassment allegations made against them.
No matter the attempts to remove sexual harassers from the journalism field, in the case of an industry with such deep-rooted, enduring toxicity, the effects of harassment oftentimes spawn permanent scars.
Following the release of The New York Times story, Helen Donahue, a former Vice Media employee who reported experiencing sexual misconduct within the company, expressed her thoughts on Twitter: “VICE took a year of my life from me. I quit journalism. I quit writing. A world like this was not safe for me. I felt like I was under water every day and no one could hear me scream, or they looked away.”
With all things considered, the question remains as for how to eradicate such journalistic inequities.
This is where The Post and Graham’s story become even more timely. In the film, Graham receives a call during a dinner party. A call that could either cement or endanger the newspaper’s legacy. On one phone line, Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, urges her to publish the Pentagon Papers. On another, her lawyers advise her to hold off, or risk repercussions from the Nixon administration.
A long pause precedes Graham’s final decision — I distinctly remember an aura of intense anticipation flow through the theater. And then: “Let’s go. Let’s publish.”
Her choice to release the Pentagon Papers represents so much more than the freedom of the press. Graham encapsulates everything that the journalism industry desperately needs: women in leadership positions who are trusted in their capabilities to make change.
Much of the inequality that runs rampant in the journalism field stems from power and presence. An environment where women are underrepresented both in authority and in numbers is a space where hoping for gender equality is nothing but a futile desire.
The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report reflects a strong correlation between industries with female representation in leadership and hiring for women. The same report also reflects that female CEOs tend to pay their high-earning women more than male CEOs do.
But in those statistics lies another problem: in order to increase female representation in the journalism field and create an environment that is geared towards the interests and well-being of women, we first need more female leaders who can do the hiring — we need more Katharine Grahams.
In an interview with Variety, Meryl Streep expressed displeasure with the minimal progress that has been made in increasing female leadership in the workforce ever since the events in The Post.
“I try to tell young women who weren’t alive then how different it was very recently and it still is in those leadership circles,” she said. “We’ve filled up the bottom of the pyramid, but where it all gets decided, we don’t have parity. We’re not even close.”
And she’s right: last year’s American Society of News Editors census reported that just 38.9% of newsroom leaders are women.
We have a long way to go before gaining equality in journalism, and it won’t be easy. But it’s icons like Katharine Graham who give me hope. When I saw The Post, even amidst my frustrations for how little the industry has advanced, Graham’s steadfast leadership made me believe that there is the potential for better days on the horizon.
After all, if one woman can make history, who knows what a field full of female journalism leaders could accomplish?
The possibilities are endless — and I can’t wait to see what women can do.
