Secret Solidarity
For women in journalism, mentorship is creating alternative pathways to opportunity
By Farnia Fekri
The dimly lit room is so crowded that I’m sharing two seats with three women. A line of people less desperate for a seat stands in the back, having given up on finding chairs. It’s November 30, 2016, and Broadsheet is hosting a panel called Women, Power, and the Newsroom. “This is a great turnout,” says National Post reporter Ashley Csanady, who is moderating. Under the yellow and green stage lights, she begins with a description of Broadsheet, an informal group organized by a few women journalists — including Csanady and BuzzFeed Canada managing editor Lauren Strapagiel — shortly after Jian Ghomeshi was fired by CBC. Its tagline is, “An event for women in media to hang with other women in media.” Looking around, between sips of gin and ginger ale, I recognize women from Vice, BuzzFeed, and Chatelaine in the back room of Supermarket Restaurant and Bar in Toronto’s Kensington Market. On the stage beside Csanady, three notable women journalists smile at the crowd: Anne Marie Owens, editor-in-chief of the National Post; Christina Vardanis, executive editor of Chatelaine; and Piya Chattopadhyay, CBC radio host.
The panel starts with an extended conversation about the U.S. election. It’s been three weeks since Hillary Clinton lost, but the wound is raw. “It’s folly for anyone to pretend that part of why she lost wasn’t because she’s a woman,” Chattopadhyay says. “That should be hard for all of us to take. Yes, we are people that are in leadership positions and have been firsts. It’s not only about firsts — it’s about seconds and thirds and all the people that follow. What I’ve learned from this is, ‘Goddamn, we’ve got a lot of work to do.’”
The conversation switches to the topic of being women in journalism, but the tone stays the same. Whether it’s about motherhood, promotions, or just navigating the office as a woman, there is a sense of exhaustion, but also solidarity. I hear it as women introduce themselves to one another or laugh loudly at Chattopadhyay’s jokes.
Until now, aside from isolated panels at larger conferences or conversations with classmates, I haven’t seen such a formal gathering of women in Toronto media. By many accounts, the highs and lows of being a Canadian woman journalist are discussed in closed Facebook groups, over dinner, or in private messages. Whether it’s third-trimester-pregnant Chantal Braganza from TVO looking to other women who’ve dealt with maternity leave, or AOL Canada’s Rashida Jeeva, who leads a newsroom that’s vastly different from the one she started in, or BuzzFeed Canada’s Scaachi Koul taking to Twitter to talk about safety — female mentorship is growing stronger. It’s small things like supporting one another’s work and being kind, but it’s also sharing secret looks and text messages about sexism and safety. The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, every panel I attended for this feature, and four years of a journalism degree have taught me that women in the Canadian media industry have made less money, gotten fewer opportunities, and faced more safety concerns, all of which is daunting enough. Now, as newsrooms shrink and layoffs plague the biggest companies, female journalists must turn to their own networks and back channels to bridge the wide gender gap.
One of the earliest solutions was the Canadian Women’s Press Club, formed in 1904. At a time when more than half the population was not allowed to vote, 16 women journalists created professional support to improve their gender’s lot in the industry. Its membership peaked in 1968 at about 700, but the club folded in the 1990s. Now, formal avenues for support for women are limited. A national organization that centres on the problems of Canadian women in journalism is nonexistent. When it comes to mentorship, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Canada program (open to all genders) is as close as it gets. “The mentorship program is open to everyone,” says Kayla Perry, CWA Canada’s associate membership coordinator, “but female relationships are so important.” Perry, who’s barely older than my 22-year-old self, admits she’s closest to her women mentors. In a newsroom, the added difficulties of sexism can be brutal, she says. But interactions on social media have recently transformed personal problems into conversations about systemic issues. Women journalists who are strangers to one another find solidarity in swapping war stories about bad editors and threatening interviews. “Other women have had such a difficult time breaking into the field,” Perry says. “They understand the struggles. Especially now, it’s more back channels and making connections through Twitter.”
It’s the early 1990s, and Rashida Jeeva sits in the Toronto Sun offices. The red brick building at 333 King Street East has become home since she immigrated to Canada from South Africa in 1989. The transition is going well — though she admits she didn’t take into consideration how cold it would be — but this day is one she’ll remember decades later, newsrooms later, as a hiccup in an otherwise rewarding career. She doesn’t remember the details, but the words still ring in her ear. Her male colleague turns to her, and tells her she’s lucky.
“Lucky, why?” she asks.
“That you’re a woman,” he responds, “a woman of colour. That’s probably why you were hired.”
Cold anger ripples through Jeeva. She strides into the office of Lorrie Goldstein, an editor at the Sun, and demands to know why he hired her. “‘I hired you because you’re a good journalist. The fact that you’re a woman and a woman of colour is a bonus,’” she recalls the editor answering.
From then on, Jeeva put her head down and worked. She was never pigeonholed, but she also didn’t look for help. She became the assistant lifestyle editor. She became the executive producer of lifestyle at canoe.ca. Then it was off to AOL Canada. And Yahoo! And The Globe and Mail. And then back to AOL as general manager of the then-newly founded Huffington Post Canada. She currently juggles this and another job as the head of content for AOL Canada. Twenty five years since the Goldstein conversation, sitting in the Huffington Post office near King Street West and Spadina Avenue, she repeats my question about mentors, slowly turning over the words: “Was there one particular woman who was a guiding light for me in Canada?”
The words hang in the air. Jeeva’s colleague, Andree Lau, managing editor of news, is equally as stuck on the question. She can’t think of an answer. I get an email from her on my way out, as the doors of Huffington Post Canada’s elevator close: “My ‘mentors,’” the subject line reads. “I’ve had a lot of people I look up to who have trained me,” she writes. “But I don’t really have mentors in the true definition.”
The next time I see Lau, we talk about a shifting media landscape that has become difficult for even the most privileged. “When I started a lot of it was, ‘Well, suck it up and … build a thick skin,’” she says. “That’s changed — we realize that people need to be nurtured.”
Lau and Jeeva are gratified by the diversity of the current Huffington Post newsroom. Jeeva says the most rewarding moments for her are when she’s able to grab the occasional coffee with the women she mentors. One of them, Lisa Yeung, is the managing editor of lifestyle. Yeung tells me she’s looked to Jeeva as a role model for 17 years. “Did you ever think it would be different for you?” I ask them. “That the path would be different for you, maybe different than for a white man?”
Many women journalists understand that they’re still at a disadvantage, Yeung says, but the idea that women, or even women of colour, have to work harder to level the playing field didn’t bother her at the start of her career. Her first journalism boss at canoe.ca was a woman, after all. She looks to her left at Jeeva. They’re sitting on a couch in a small, tinted-glass room off the main HuffPo workspace: different newsroom, same mentor.
Selena Ross, Scaachi Koul, Stacey May Fowles, Andrea Bellemare, and Carly Lewis face a packed room. On a January 2016 afternoon in Toronto, the second-last day of NASH78 — the Canadian University Press’s (CUP) national conference — they are featured on a panel about women’s safety in media. The tone, like the reality, is depressing. Hours before, having talked to students in a post-panel huddle, Koul had tweeted, “It is a bad thing if [women of colour] students are more comfortable coming to me, a stranger and a real bitch, than they are their schools.”
Eight months later, at BuzzFeed Canada’s office, I remind Koul of her tweet. Women, she says — especially younger women — talk to one another. In an industry that doesn’t protect them, they have to protect one another. “That’s the development of back channels women use when we start working,” she says. “So when the Jian Ghomeshi stuff came out, everybody was talking, ‘Well, we all knew!’ The week I moved to Toronto in 2008, I met somebody who told me, ‘Oh yeah, he’s [creepy].’ The week I moved here! I was 17, and then he gets arrested when I was 24.”
The Twitter messages, Facebook chats, and private emails, born out of necessity, reveal a quiet acceptance of insidious problems. “It’s unfortunate,” Koul says. “We do it to keep one another safe and to stay working, and to keep ourselves mentally comfortable.”
On July 5, 2014, sitting behind her computer in Brooklyn, Leigh Stein is on the brink of taking on a mammoth task. A few keyboard strokes and she’s done it — she’s committed. She’s going to organize BinderCon, borrowing the name of Anna Fitzpatrick’s Facebook group, Binders, for a conference in New York City that will bring female and gender-non-conforming writers together.
“You know that’s a lot of work, right?” her boyfriend says.
“I know!” she responds. (Later on she’ll admit she had no idea).
Stein had been obsessed with the group ever since she was added by her friend, Elissa Bassist (editor of Funny Women at The Rumpus), checking it several times a day to watch notable journalists and famous poets help one another. She had just woken up from a nap, jetlagged after a vacation in Budapest (where she took her laptop to keep up with Binders). She was in a fix-the-gender-gap mood. “I thought it was just going to be one conference— that was the extent of my vision,” she recalls. But then more than 100 people signed on to help, and then a co-founder stepped in, and then they raised $55,000 on Kickstarter. Within three months, the first BinderCon hosted more than 500 people and was featured on MSNBC.
A Facebook group dedicated to non-male writers, Binders divides into subgroups such as Canadians, essayists, and millennials. Named after a 2012 quote by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Binders now has over 40,000 members and has become a springboard for ideas, support, and resources — such as contact information for writers wanting to pitch to magazines. The group also occasionally serves as a place for editors to solicit pitches, creating relationships with and opportunities for women and gender-non-conforming writers.
Now, Stein lives in Connecticut. She’s become executive director of Out of the Binders, a New York state nonprofit, organizing two conferences a year: New York City in autumn, and Los Angeles in spring. The sixth conference, which I went to, was held in April 2017. It had the same mission as the first, and continued a BinderCon tradition: the Speed Pitch, where writers pitch editors and agents.
Harper’s Magazine didn’t have a female editor available to send to the first conference, so it sent a man — the only man there, Stein told me. The magazine comes up again in our conversation when Stein talks about the industry’s gender problems as publicized by the VIDA Count, which has been publishing the share of bylines by gender in major magazines and literary journals annually since 2010. “This is one of the reasons I wanted to start this conference,” she says. “I thought, ‘What can I do to change these pie charts?’”
Outside of Binders, BinderCon, and VIDA, several American organizations have addressed issues faced by women in media. One is The Establishment, a multimedia publication “funded and run by women.” Popular with Binders, it seeks to recreate the concept it’s named after. “If you’re the gatekeeper, you have power to allow for more voices to be heard,” Nikki Gloudeman, one of the co-founders, tells me. “The world is changing. It’s not okay that the media continues to share this limited perspective of our current reality.
“I don’t think the opportunities are just opening up. You have to fight.”
On a warm October afternoon, in a well-lit office in the City building at Victoria and Dundas streets in downtown Toronto, I meet Tracy Moore. She’s on the phone, ordering the dress Sophie Grégoire Trudeau has just worn — from Moore’s fashion line, because she has her own fashion line — to appear on her show. She hosts Cityline, the longest-running lifestyle show in Canada. The 42-year-old media personality bounced between CTV, CBC, and Breakfast Television before settling at City. She now manages an empire of clothes, TV, and family (husband, two kids, dog), and uses her show to celebrate beauty and unity among women of colour.
She’s not shy about admitting that she didn’t get a lot of help becoming a notable journalist. Recalling her first shadowing experience at an internship with CTV, she says, “I was supposed to be shadowing a local reporter at CFTO. She didn’t really want me to come out with her on a story.” She met the reporter and the cameraman the next day anyway. Despite her excitement, she couldn’t break out of her shell. She wasn’t joining in on the conversations or jokes, and her discomfort showed. “I was supposed to shadow this person for two days,” Moore says, “and at the end of day one, she said, ‘No. We’re not doing this again.’”
Heartbroken and ashamed, Moore used the experience to learn to be assertive. Almost two decades later, she admits that, though she is frequently approached by young journalists and wants to help, she doesn’t know what a real mentor-mentee relationship looks like. “There was no system in place for helping one another,” she says. “It really was getting by, the best I could, on merit and working really hard.”
As I begin the kind of steps Moore took at the beginning of her career, the landscape for mentorship couldn’t be more different. At every turn, I feel that I can find a female journalist — usually a woman of colour — who is generous with her help. Whether it’s Jeeva giving me a tour of the Huffngton Post Canada office, journalist Karen Ho emailing to compliment me on my latest article, or Moore telling me to reach out to her if I need career advice — I feel like I’m batting with a legion of supportive strangers in the stands. The game might be rigged against me (and it is from the moment I apply for a job, as a woman of colour and a young journalist), but their cheers often drown that out.
It’s July 11, 2016, and I am focusing on the white lace on my kitchen table, hyperventilating. A Canadaland editor/near-stranger named Jane Lytvynenko has pitched me a story. I’m going to write my first paid freelance article.
I’ve known of Lytvynenko for a few years. I’ve seen her from afar at conferences. I’ve even grabbed a beer with her. But for her to come to me with an idea seems incredibly generous; it disrupts the freelancer-pitch continuum. I have a vague understanding, at that moment, that someone has just taken an unsolicited bet on me.
“Thank you for thinking of me!” I message her. “Smart. Lady. Journos,” is her response.
When I meet Chantal Braganza for coffee — she orders mint tea — at Balzac’s Coffee Roasters on Gould Street, she’s hugely pregnant. Braganza, now a digital editor at TVO, began her career as an intern at The United Church Observer, before moving on to another internship at the Toronto Star. There was no shortage of mentors in her career, she says, especially considering her bosses at the Star and the Observer. “Or someone like Denise Balkissoon, whom I met at the Star because we were both interns there,” Braganza says. “We stayed in touch, we became friends, and found ourselves working with each other.”
The relationship between Balkissoon (who now works at The Globe and Mail) and Braganza isn’t uncommon. It also exists between Braganza and The Fader’s Anupa Mistry, and between Mistry and Balkissoon. I’ve recently started to notice this invisible thread, a sort of six-degrees-of-women-journalists-separation, especially on Twitter: between Koul and Ho and Strapagiel and Lytvynenko and Fitzpatrick and other women. Sometimes, it’s just a reflection of friendships in real life. But other times, I learned in my interviews, the women involved have never even met. They connect on social media, and, by virtue of being women in a struggling industry, they bond. “In industries where there are structural inequality issues that make it difficult to move into upper management, such networks are necessary,” Braganza says. “Journalism absolutely is one of these industries.”
On a crisp January 2017 afternoon, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, I sit with dozens of other journalism students listening to a NASH79 panel discussion about the disproportionate amount of harassment women in journalism face. On the stage of the Fredericton Convention Centre’s Pointe Sainte-Anne room sit Jan Wong, Shireen Ahmed, Lee Thomas, and Sarah Ratchford.
“In Canadian media, which I often refer to as the mayonnaise factory, the people making the decisions are white men,” Ahmed, a freelance sports writer, says to a chorus of laughter.
In the question and answer period, a female student steps up to the mic to talk about sports writing. She’s a sports journalist, she says, adding that she often feels she doesn’t belong in its hyper-masculine world. “How [do] you push back against that?”
“First of all, I’m going to give you my card. I’m going to add you to a secret Facebook group that is for women sports writers,” Ahmed answers. Despite the laughter rippling through the crowd, she selects her next words carefully and says them seriously. She’s giving advice she wants remembered. “You love sports. You love what you do — you’re there. What we can do is support you, as much as we can as colleagues, and help you out if you need contacts — stuff like this is easy.”
Farnia Fekri is the managing editor of business and audience development at the RRJ. You can read her ramblings at @f_fekri.
