During my first semester and a half, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I noticed that my Journalism classes are filled with women, so I surely thought that Journalism and news writing was a female-dominated profession.
However, I suddenly realized that it is not.
I began to read more articles, in print and online, and noticed that there were not many women writing the hard-hitting news articles. As I started to realize this, I also realized something else.
There are very few people of color, as well.
According to the ASNE Diversity Survey, women makeup about two-thirds of journalism graduates but only make up about one-third of the people in actual newsrooms.
Where are all the women going?
Most women are not getting jobs in newsrooms because of family conflicts and other things of that nature.
Eighty-four percent of men won the last century's Pulitzer Prizes, according to the Women's Media Center report "The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2017."
Women are needed in newsrooms because they offer a unique perspective on stories that most men could not bring. Women are known to bring out the human-interest part of stories, and they can point out small details that would make a massive difference to the public.
For example, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about the college jock to Wall Street Pipeline, and it was a woman who read the article and pointed out that women were not represented in the section because of the wording and the writer recognized that small mistake after the report went through editing and fixed it. The reporters said that the response from the public would have been entirely different if they did not change the wording to include female athletes.
However, women of color are probably not being represented in newsrooms. Black women make up about 2.5% of all journalists, according to the 2016 ANSE Diversity Report. People of color are underrepresented, in general, and it creates some significant issues.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to discuss the recent "race riots" that way underway in Detroit and the ones that occurred in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Newark, a few years before. The commission's purpose was to uncover why these race riots took place.
Journalism had nothing to do with the commission, but they soon found out that journalism and the media played a massive part in what was occurring. The coverage of the riots was skewed and inflated to make them seem worse than they were. This type of coverage did not accurately inform the white audience and muffled people of color voices, so they were not being heard.
The Kerner Commission said ". . . The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man's world," and that creates unconscious biases for the white audiences and it should not because that is not the purpose of journalism. The goal of journalism is to educate people about what is happening in the world around them in a factual, authentic and transparent way.
To fix this issue, the commission suggested that news organizations hire more people of color to cover their communities more holistically. Also, they would have more of a voice in what is being reported and what details are appropriate to add and exclude when reporting about a person of color.
The number of people of color and women in newsrooms needs to increase because they are essential and bring some needed differences to the table.
Overall, the number of women in journalism increased from 38.7% to 39.1% from 2016 to 2017. The number of minorities slightly decreased from 2016 to 2017 from 16.94% to 16.55%.
Though newsrooms are more diverse than they had been about a decade ago, we still have a long road ahead of us.
