Would the women please stand up? Nearly four years ago the Medill Class of 2009 was gathered in the Fisk auditorium for orientation.
The room rose, thundering – was anyone still sitting? Then the audience gasped: No one had expected the school that took less than 10 percent of applicants to be so overwhelmingly female.
Medill’s current undergraduates are 69 percent female. The breakdown was the same the year before, and 71 percent were female in the ’04-’05 school year.
“It is no secret that for many years, women have constituted the large majority of undergraduates majoring in journalism at Northwestern,” wrote Roger Boye, former director of undergraduate studies and Medill dean, in a column in The Daily in Jan. 2002.
If you’ve been around The Daily office lately, you’d notice something similar. As I sit here, only six of the 16 people in the newsroom are male – and two of them are sports editors. At a staff meeting a little over a month ago, the girl-to-guy ratio was 2:1.
For the first time since I’ve been here, it’s all women in charge. Editor in chief Emily Glazer leads with two female managing editors. This is normal to most of the underclassmen staff; Glazer succeeded Libby Nelson, and reporters are used to being surrounded by women in their journalism classes. No one really minds – with estrogen has come baked goods.
But in the last 50 years there have been only 11 other female editors in chief. In 1969, current Medill Prof.Donna Leff beat out three male applicants to become the third female editor in chief of The Daily. “It was unusual,” she said. “The guys were supposed to get it.”
The numbers don’t add up. “Is it possible, quite simply, that there’s a glass ceiling – real or perceived – at The Daily?” Boye asked in the column.
If there was one, it shattered. This pattern isn’t unique to The Daily. “We have had a history of having male editors in chief,” said Stephen Dockery, the outgoing editor of The Daily Orange, the student newspaper at Syracuse. Yet of the last six editors in chief at that paper as well as at the Harvard Crimson, half have been female.
In a response to Boye’s column, former Daily managing editor Sara Neufeld blamed the lack of female editors on a lack of desire. “In the fall of 1996, a slew of overeager freshmen – most of us female – joined The Daily before New Student Week had even ended. We all wanted to be editor in chief someday, ” she wrote. “We did not realize we were a dying breed at the Medill School of Journalism.”
Indeed, many of the male editors in chief have been sole candidates. This year was the first time in four years that multiple candidates applied – both women. (I’m not exactly a good example; I aspire to traditionally male privileges of unhesitating assertiveness, mind over manners and physical strength – but never editor in chief of The Daily.)
If The Daily has solved its problem, NU hasn’t; Leff is currently the only tenured female professor at Medill. “It’s disgusting,” she said. Of her two graduate classes, one is all women, and the other is 83 percent female.
Progress at the Daily is a good sign, but Medill has a long way to go. As Leff said, “The profession is less sexist than the academy.”
Medill senior Jen Wieczner can be reached at [email protected]
