Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Women have ways to go on op-ed pages

When Karen DeCrow, Medill ’59 and former president of the National Organization for Women, spoke at Northwestern last quarter, she brought newspaper clippings from the past 40 years declaring the women’s movement dead.

DeCrow contended that the movement isn’t dead. It just doesn’t receive the attention it deserves from the mainstream press.

DeCrow’s message hit home for me in the past few weeks as I read commentaries from across the country about the scarcity of female newspaper columnists. Syndicated columnist Susan Estrich ignited the debate last month when she accused the opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times of gender bias for declining to run her columns. Since then, male and female writers across the map have weighed in on the issue.

A survey by Editor and Publisher magazine showed that only about 24 percent of columnists from major news outlets are women. Those results are no cause for celebration. But what’s the big deal? Should we start hiring female columnists just because they are women?

One response came from The Washington Post’s lone female op-ed columnist, Anne Applebaum.

“There’s nothing wrong with a general conversation about how women can be helped to succeed in law school or taught not to fear having strong opinions,” Applebaum wrote. “But trust me, in none of these contexts do you want to start calculating percentages.”

Applebaum may have a point. But percentages provide plenty of ammunition for the case that the women’s movement still has a long way to go. Sticking with newspapers, representation of women beyond the editorial pages still stinks. Only about 37 percent of newsroom staffers are women, according to the 2004 census by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Women also appear less often than men in newspaper stories. A 2003 study by NU’s own Readership Insititute found that about 80 percent of all people mentioned in newspaper stories are men.

You can draw one of two conclusions from that figure. Either women are less involved in issues and events that are important enough to appear in the newspaper. Or, more likely, reporters more often cite men as authorities on the news of the day.

I won’t jump onto the sinking ship with Harvard President Lawrence Summers and argue about inherent differences between men and women that might explain these disparities. But women and men experience the world differently, by virtue of both their socialization and their biological sex.

Op-ed pages, the traditional forum for significant societal discussions, and news pages, the first draft of history, both require women’s participation to reflect a truly diverse range of experiences.

Ladies, we have a long way to go.

Elaine Helm is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].

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Women have ways to go on op-ed pages