Why Is This Still Happening?
Jian Ghomeshi and other high-profile cases are a bleak reminder that sexism in the newsroom still exists and will take years to eliminate — if we ever do.
By Catherine Phillips
ONE LATE OCTOBER 2014 AFTERNOON IN Toronto, Lauren Strapagiel met with eight of her friends to revive their fizzling book club. They’d planned a low-key meeting to pick the next month’s read, but within minutes of gathering, the pinging of cellphones filled the room. Eyes widened. Most of them worked in the media, and this was a juicy media story: CBC’s radio darling, Jian Ghomeshi, had left Q. Nobody there knew why — yet. Book club forgotten, Strapagiel and her friends speculated about the reasons for Ghomeshi’s unexpected departure. Many had heard rumours of bad behaviour toward women, but nothing had been substantiated. And they wondered aloud: did it have anything to do with that? Hours after their meeting derailed, Ghomeshi published a Facebook post, blaming “a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer.” Initially, his statement was both lauded and derided. Then, on October 26, 2014, the Toronto Star published its first story about three of the women who had come forward with allegations of abuse. Headlined “CBC fires Jian Ghomeshi over sex allegations,” the story detailed accounts of women who said Ghomeshi was violent toward them before or during sex. He would eventually be arrested and charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance to sexual assault by choking. He was acquitted of three counts of sexual assault as well as the one count of overcoming resistance to sexual assault by choking on March 24, 2016. On May 11, the fourth sexual assault charge was withdrawn after Ghomeshi apologized in court to his former CBC colleague Kathryn Borel for his “sexually inappropriate behaviour” in the workplace, and signed a peace bond.
As the Star continued to break stories about Ghomeshi, conversations about sexism, sexual harassment, rape, and assault thundered through the public sphere — breaking free from the hushed spaces in which they were usually held. And in newsrooms across the country, female staff and management alike wondered whether the old boys’ club had ever truly gone away. For many women, that answer is an obvious “no.” Strapagiel had long shared stories over beers with her friends — stories of men with reputations that have gone publicly unquestioned. It’s these conversations that inspired Broadsheet, which debuted less than a month after the Ghomeshi story broke. Strapagiel, managing editor at BuzzFeed Canada, and National Post reporter Ashley Csanady launched a semi-regular event to give women in media a place to discuss their work, make new friends, and openly talk about their experiences in the industry. “Everybody seems to know a guy or has worked for a guy who’s weird toward women,” says Strapagiel, “or dismissive of women, or angry with women, or threatened by women.”
The first Broadsheet event was held on the evening of November 20, 2014, at the now-closed Victory Cafe in west Toronto. It was a relaxed event, with around 40 or 50 people visiting over the course of the night. Of course, they talked about Ghomeshi. But it quickly became clear that women felt the allegations against him weren’t isolated; they were part of a larger industry workplace culture.
WOMEN CAN FACE SUCH UNIQUE PRESSURES in media that Vivian Smith, a 14-year Globe and Mail veteran turned sessional instructor at University of Victoria, even wrote a book about it. Released in 2015, Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love — and Leave — Their Newspaper Careers, is Smith’s rewritten PhD thesis. It offers insights from women across the country on their experiences as journalists — both good and bad. Smith says that women have been in the majority at North American journalism schools for the past 30 years. At Carleton University in Ottawa, for example, women have made up 80 percent of undergraduate enrolment since 2001. Yet despite statistics like these, women still hold minority status, occupying only 35.3 percent of supervisory roles in journalism in the United States as of 2015. What’s more, women may not even be in the building. According to the “Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015” report by Women’s Media Center — an American non-profit organization co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem that works to increase the visibility and power of women in media — women journalists made up only 37.2 percent of newspaper newsrooms in 2014 — up a mere one-third of a percent since 1999. “You’d think,” Smith says, “that we’d dominate newspapers.”
The most recent surveys on sexual harassment in newsrooms date back to the mid-1990s — two decades ago. A 1994 Newspaper Research Journal study found that 80 percent of women in the newsroom had experienced varying degrees of workplace sexual harassment, from degrading comments to physical sexual harassment. In 1997, a Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly study found that 60 percent had suffered the same. This wasn’t surprising to Smith, who says the need for research in the area was one of the reasons she wrote Outsiders Still. Recent high-profile cases in both Canada and the United States suggest that some of that culture lingers — if it ever really went away. After Toronto Star reporter Raveena Aulakh committed suicide in May 2016, public editor Kathy English addressed Aulakh’s suicide note. The tragedy revealed the Star’s unexpectedly troubling workplace culture, instigated an internal investigation, and highlighted a need for reformed workplace relationship guidelines. The following month, Roger Ailes, then chairman and CEO of Fox News, resigned after former anchor Gretchen Carlson led a lawsuit against him, alleging sexual harassment. That September, New York magazine revealed allegations that Ailes’s workplace harassment had begun long before then, dating back three decades. And newspapers aren’t always on the side of women. Last year, when The Washington Post released a tape from 2005 in which Donald Trump blusters about groping women without their consent, it reduced his actions to “lewd conversation.” A Globe and Mail tweet said Trump was “bragging about kissing and groping women.” One of The Boston Globe’s early reports erased the women’s experiences entirely by calling it a failed attempt at seduction.
This should not still be happening.
“AN ALREADY STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENT,” SAYS Smith, “is compounded for women by family issues, sexism, and the proverbial glass ceiling.” According to a 2009 study of 715 American newspapers, 21 percent of women journalists in the Western world say they are “burned out, frustrated, and thinking of leaving the field altogether,” compared to 16 percent of men. Women can face sexism and harassment, not only from colleagues and management, but also from their sources and even public bystanders. In May 2014, CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt confronted a group of men at a Toronto FC match who yelled “fuck her right in the pussy” at her on television — a form of harassment that’s become trendy for men who want to be seen disrupting live broadcasts. The video of Hunt standing up to her harasser went viral and shed light on one of the more public displays of harassment with which women in media are expected to put up. For many women journalists, these incidents can make it feel like the old adage is true: the more things change, the more they stay the same — and some women have faced sexist treatment their whole careers, from the subtle to the terrifyingly bold.
For Jan Wong, fighting sexism in the newsroom was part of the job. Now an associate journalism professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Wong easily rattled off memories of discrimination from the years she spent at the Montreal Gazette, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail. Today, she heartily laughs about many of them — even if they’re not really funny. For example, when Wong started working as a business reporter at the Montreal Gazette in 1981, there were only a few women in the business section — maybe three in a staff of at least 12 writers. At lunch, Wong says that all of the men would go to a tavern where, as with most Quebec taverns at the time, women were barred from entering. “I know,” says Wong. “It sounds like the dark ages.”
But she really liked her colleagues, and one day she decided she would go with them for lunch. For Wong, having lunch with colleagues is an important time — it’s when writers network and talk over their work, their stories, and their ideas. Wong laughs while recalling the day she convinced her male colleagues she was joining them in the tavern. “We’re going to go, we’re going to walk in, and I’ll handle it,” she told them. “I sat down, I looked at the menu, and the waiter came over. I just looked at him and gave him my order, and he looked at me, didn’t say a word, and he brought me my food and that was it — I broke the barrier. And after that, I always went with my friends.” It wasn’t great, Wong admitted — the food sucked and the waiters smelled like urine — but her point was made.
Today, discrimination may not be as obvious as an outright ban on women, but it still exists. In the 1980s, when Smith was in her 30s and, as she puts it, “up and coming” in a senior editorial role, the newsroom atmosphere was one of everyday sexism, although that’s not what they called it back then. Back then, it was just the way it was. More than that, the power imbalance was pervasive. It wasn’t lost on Smith, but she doubts that her male colleagues noticed it. After all, they were in the majority, and women were merely guests. Although she was never shunned, Smith says that she didn’t feel like she was on even footing with her male colleagues for promotion or advancement. Women in the newsroom were in a constant battle with sexism — an extra fight they had to wage in order to get the same benefits. Today, Smith senses a hangover from the type of blatant sexism Wong and others experienced — a sort of residue that lingers in newsrooms as a response to the history of male dominance in the industry.
Journalism undoubtedly influences public discourse. The way journalists report on sexual violence affects the way it is publicly understood — and it can get pretty messy when newsrooms themselves are mired in sexism. That’s where Femifesto, a grassroots, Toronto-based feminist organization that combats rape culture, comes in. Founded by Farrah Khan, Shannon Giannitsopoulou, and Sasha Elford in 2010 for the purpose of recognizing media’s power in shaping our understanding of sexual violence, Femifesto provides workshops, resources, and education on consent and gender-based violence to media outlets, journalism schools, corporations, and students. The organization’s media guide, “Use the Right Words: Media Reporting on Sexual Violence in Canada,” calls on the media to help transform the nature of their coverage on sexual violence. To help do that, it provides resources to journalists, including its language checklist for reporting on sexual assault—which outlines, for example, that journalists should use phrases like “according to” and not overuse words like “claimed.”
The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), a Toronto-based charity and non-profit run by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), also addresses the ways that media tend to err when telling women’s stories. The project has tracked the changing roles and representations of women in media since 1995. Twenty years later, evidence from over 100 countries shows how little progress has actually been made. Although there were more women reporting in 2015 than there were in 1995, women made up a mere 24 percent of people heard, read about, or seen in radio, print, and television news—unchanged from 2010—and the overall share of stories that primarily focus on women has hovered around 10 percent since 2000. One of the GMMP’s goals is to end media sexism by 2020. At this rate, the goal seems unlikely. “There are so many ways sexism can happen in a workplace, including a newsroom. It’s just more subtle now,” says Strapagiel from a boardroom in BuzzFeed’s Toronto office. “No one’s going to grab your ass—God, I hope nobody does that.”
Strapagiel has felt sexism when being assigned certain types of stories with the expectation that women are better at covering the “soft stuff.” “There’s this weird divide between hard news and soft news, where hard news would be populated by men, and lifestyle, fashion, and beauty is largely women—incredibly talented, majestic women, who are just never taken seriously.” This bears out in the numbers. According to the “Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015” report, women journalists were more likely to write about culture (42.2 percent), education (54.6 percent), health (49.3 percent), lifestyle (49.6 percent), and religion (49.6 percent) than politics (34.9 percent), criminal justice (32.5 percent), science (35.2 percent), technology (37.7 percent), and sports (10.2 percent). Women made up just under 40 percent of bylines at The Washington Post, 32.3 percent at The New York Times, and 40 percent at the Los Angeles Times. Bylines by men outnumbered bylines by women at the Associated Press and Reuters. The Huffington Post managed to not only reach gender parity, but overshot it, with 53 percent of bylines by women.
Ryerson School of Journalism assistant professor Asmaa Malik has seen her fair share of workplace sexism in the years she’s spent in newsrooms across the country, from the Montreal Gazette to the Toronto Star. “There are so many micro-aggressions when it comes to being a woman,” Malik says, referring to the subtle verbal, behavioural, and environmental discriminations that intentionally and unintentionally convey hostility toward marginalized people on a daily basis. She remembers a particular male coworker who would rub her shoulders without her consent. “You think, ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ and then you wonder, ‘What am I supposed to do, report the guy for being ‘friendly’ and rubbing my shoulders?’” As an intern early in her career, she adds, she didn’t feel like she could speak up.
Pinpointing the root of sexism is difficult for most women, but for Malik, identifying whether she has been discriminated against because she is a woman or a woman of colour is even more difficult. “It’s not like you can separate the two,” she says. “I don’t think I’m a woman and then the other part of me is of colour—I am a woman of colour, it’s my experience. So that kind of discrimination is insidious.” For women of colour, race and gender are two things that are intertwined, and discrimination has many different guises. But the difficulty in pinpointing it is part of what makes it systemic. “If it’s systemic, then you can never point to it,” Malik says. “You can say it’s a pattern, but some people will see the pattern and some people won’t.”
Attention must be paid to how women’s experiences as journalists can be tethered with sexual harassment. Women who have experienced systemic discrimination and outright sexual harassment in the newsroom often feel like they lack institutional support—whether it’s a woman who is hit on or harassed while interviewing a source, or one who is forced to privately deal with online threats. Providing information about spotting sexual harassment and supporting women in the newsroom has become increasingly important. Training on respect in the workplace, human rights concepts, and bystander intervention was recommended in the “CBC Workplace Investigation Regarding Jian Ghomeshi” report. Meanwhile, resources like WACC’s Who Makes the News?, the Global Media Monitoring Project, and UNESCO’s Global Alliance on Media and Gender strive for gender equality in and through the media.
We may have come a long way, but don’t let that fool you. Once blatant, now insidious, sexism festers in hidden cracks within newsrooms, where equal opportunity is often assumed. But sexism is also a part of our broader culture, and in a time when human rights are as tenuous as ever, we can’t assume we’re moving forward.
Catherine Phillips is the print production editor at the RRJ. Follow her on Twitter @csandsphillips
