“What we’re seeing in media is part of a larger phenomenon for women in leadership in all sorts of fields,” says Melanie Sill, vice president of content at the public radio station KPCC in Southern California. “We’re slipping, as an industry and maybe as a society, back to a place where women didn’t get the same opportunities and didn’t have the same influence.”

Nieman Reports set out to document the current state of female newsroom leadership. As part of the research for our cover story, Where Are the Women?, written by Anna Griffin, a reporter and editor at The Portland Oregonian, NR interviewed more than 40 current and former editors, publishers, investors, media entrepreneurs, and academics. We examined the mastheads of top news outlets, reviewed research papers on gender in journalism leadership, and asked a score of current and former female editors of print, broadcast, and online news outlets to share their own stories. Among the newsroom leaders interviewed are Julia Turner of Slate, Anna Holmes of Fusion, Kate O’Brian of Al Jazeera America, Nancy Gibbs of Time, Meredith Artley of CNN Digital, Kathleen Carroll of The Associated Press, and Aminda Marqués Gonzalez of The Miami Herald. Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski explains the motivations behind the story in Ensuring Women Have A Seat at the Leadership Table.

What NR found is, despite overall historic gains and pockets of progress, women lag when it comes to leading. The results of this gender disparity in leadership are especially pernicious in journalism. To best serve the public as watchdogs and truth-tellers, news organizations need a broad array of voices and perspectives. To thrive financially, they must appeal to an equally broad array of potential viewers, listeners, and readers. Plus, content analyses and anecdotal evidence suggest that a newsroom leader’s gender can have a subtle but important influence on everything from what stories get covered and how, to who gets promoted and why. But our investigation also found that solutions do exist, as do bright spots that hint at better approaches to ensure diversity. 

The latest issue of Nieman Reports also features stories on the challenges of reporting in Cuba; “Finding the Tribe,” about the comeback of podcasts; a look at the recent upheaval in French journalism; and much more.

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