Media Women’s Glum Message

The message, loosely translated, was this: Father never did know best but he had his own production company.

And the questions raised were these: If more women were TV producers, would television more realistically reflect men, women and families of the ‘80s? If more women were publishers, would newspapers and magazines allot more space to issues such as the child-care crisis?

There were other questions. About why women in communications frequently earn less money than men doing the same jobs, why network TV has so few women on camera, why the publisher’s suite is virtually an all-male domain.

Far-Reaching Issues

These and other issues more far-reaching--such as the burnout of professional women juggling careers and families, the current crop of feature films depicting women as evil villains or hard-edged career women saved by motherhood--were discussed during “Women, Men and Media: Breakthroughs and Backlash,” a three-day conference that wound up Tuesday at USC.

The conference aimed to look beyond issues of numbers of women employed, beyond specific grievances of sex discrimination, to explore the media “as reflectors and shapers of American society” and see whether, and how, women are being heard. It was chaired by Betty Friedan, whose “The Feminine Mystique” launched the women’s movement 25 years ago.

But the dialogue quickly moved past women’s issues to embrace family issues, the contemporary conflict faced by men and women: Is it more important to climb the corporate ladder or be a loving parent?

Boston Globe associate editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman summed up that dilemma when she said, “There is a kind of sibling rivalry between institution and worker and worker and family,” a business-first dictum that is sidetracking women and young men.

Said Goodman, “We’re seeing increasingly that the room at the top is becoming a bachelor pad.”

Again and again, panelists spoke of burnout experienced by women who have been told they are superwomen. Anne Summers, the new editor of Ms. magazine, said a study of their 25- to 35-year-old readers revealed “an immense weariness, and an immense tiredness with having it all.” Yes, Summers said, the women want it all, “but not all at once.” Still, reality is that a woman on the fast track cannot usually put her career on hold for a few years.

Nancy Newhouse, a New York Times editor, pinpointed one problem: A recent Times poll showed that 89% of women working outside the home, including married women, still do the basic household chores such as cleaning and shopping.

Borrowing a slogan from the National Women’s Political Caucus, Eileen Shanahan, executive editor of Washington-based Governing magazine, put it this way: “We’ve come a short way, and don’t call me baby.”

She assailed the “unrealistic perfection” of women as portrayed on TV and the pressure it puts on real women. Shanahan asked, “I wonder if we couldn’t just in the background see a sink full of dirty dishes once in a while?”

And she suggested that the secret to “doing it all” is in defining “all.” Among her tips: Forget the gourmet cooking, don’t buy anything that needs ironing and “nobody ever died from a dust kitten under the sofa.”

The new feminist buzz phrase from this gathering was “the glass ceiling,” defined variously by speakers as “seeing the top and not being able to get there” and “the invisible barrier that you bump your head against when you’re on your way to the top.” A woman in the audience suggested another definition: “It’s what the men in the board room are standing on.”

The next question was whether to give the glass ceiling a light tap, push one’s fists through it or concede that it is impervious and find alternative routes to the top.

For women in communications, “demassification” of the mass media may be one of those routes, said author Alvin Toffler (“Future Shock”). He spoke of a future in which specialized publications will open up media “micromarkets” and opportunities for positions of influence and power for young women who are prepared.

Right now, though, the mass media dominate and the picture is not generally bright for women. KNBC-TV news anchor Linda Alvarez spoke of how women commonly are relegated to “shadow anchors” when teamed with male anchors, or given visual equality but different, and lesser, jobs.

Rapping ‘Rubber Duckies’

A woman in the audience with TV experience agreed: “We still get the rubber duckies” while the hard news stories go to the men.

Betsy Plank of Illinois Bell, who was the first woman president of the Public Relations Society of America, said women dominate at entry level in her field but, according to a recent study, the median salary for women is $31,000, for men, $48,000. Women gravitate toward nonprofit organizations, she said, men get corporate PR jobs. One result: Over a 40-year career, Plank said, women “stand to lose about $1 million in salary on the basis of gender alone.”

Several speakers suggested a “Catch-22” for women in media: Do they take the same jobs for less money or lose out on the jobs?

Janice Goodman, co-founder of the nation’s first feminist law firm, said women are going to have to sue to get pay equity and access to the management pipeline. Although few who have sued have gone on to successful careers in the organizations they sued, she said, it is not a “total suicide mission,” as many women have gone on to good careers elsewhere.

“Why worry about rocking the boat,” she asked, “when you’re not even in the boat?”

Eye-opening news from the world of traditional women’s magazines was offered by Natalie Gittelson, editorial director of McCall’s.

“When we try to approach the cutting edge,” she said, “we wind up slitting our own throats.” A piece by sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer on how women can improve their sex lives, for example, brought a flood of outraged protests from some of McCall’s 5 million mostly female subscribers.

Pointing up a polarization among women, Gittelson said, “Many, if not most (McCall’s readers) have been more intimidated than liberated by the sexual revolution, (and) feminism has not yet found the proper voice” to speak to women for whom “a job is a job is a job and how to have great sex is, by and large, pornography.”

The outlook for progress for women in network television is “extraordinarily bleak,” said former KTTV and KNXT-TV anchor Marcia Brandwynne.

Forget Dan Rather Fantasies

“Anybody who has a fantasy of becoming a female Dan Rather, forget it.” She wondered, is it time to be “the kind of women that men don’t quite like again?”

Yes, in the view of a number of women at this meeting, who think feminists have “forgotten their anger” and succumbed to a “psychological and political paralysis” ushered in with the Reagan Administration.

“The peril now,” suggested David Lawrence Jr., publisher of the Detroit Free Press, “is people thinking that we (as women and minorities) have arrived. . . . At best, we are plateaued. At worst, and I fear the worst, we are slipping.” His advice to young women: “Be a little bit nasty. . . . It’s worth the price and it is, ultimately, the only way you will get there.”

Indeed, newspaper statistics compiled over a five-year period by Jean Gaddy Wilson, director of Women and Media Research at University of Missouri School of Journalism, and released at the conference, showed no woman news division president at ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN, and only about 15 women general managers at the nation’s 850 commercial TV stations. Of the top 114 newspapers with 100,000 or more circulation, she found, only five have female top editors.

No Decision-Making Power

In general, Wilson said, editors “employ women at the smallest, least influential papers.” Whereas women are 28% of employees on the largest papers, she said, that number jumps to 57% on the smaller ones where salaries are lower.

In films, said composer Marilyn Bergman, real power is having the ability to green-light a project and commit money to it--and women do not yet have that power.

If women are 36% of working journalists, independent TV producer Marian Rees asked, “Why are there virtually no women making the big decisions, running the show, in any of the media?”

Attitudes have not changed much since 1970, said Kathy Bonk, who headed the Women’s Media Project of the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund for nearly a decade. Relating how one top male network executive told her, “I don’t know if I’m capable of dealing with women as peers,” she added, “We’re going to probably have to wait until these guys retire or die off.”

‘Good Girls’ Don’t Win

“You don’t change anyone’s attitude by being a good girl,” a newspaperwoman said. “A lot of women still believe if they work hard and keep their hair clean, good things will happen to them.”

Sally Steenland of the National Commission on Working Women has done a study of “Prime Time Power,” to see how women are faring in creative decision-making jobs in the 20 top-rated prime time TV shows. Whereas sitcoms have become kind of “female ghettos,” she said, women haven’t broken into the hard-core action shows.

In the director’s slot, “where public authority is very important,” Steenland said, only six of the 20 shows had women directors during the 1986-87 season, and those usually for only one or two episodes, “far less than a critical mass.” Her study also looked at 26 pilot programs last fall and found that they hired 113 producers, only 16 of them women.

If talent is the yardstick, she asked, “How come so many mediocre men with so little ability have such steady work?” The industry, she has concluded, is “a male bastion” with little concern for its public reputation.

Terry Louise Fisher, TV writer/producer and co-creator of “L.A. Law,” concurred: “If you’re mediocre, it does help to be a white male.”

Women have become “the bad guys” in the eyes of the media, in the view of Marcia Nasatir, film producer (“Ironweed”). Women, she said, are being portrayed as “seducing (evangelists) from the judicious path” and leading Presidents astray (as in Judith Exner’s for-pay interview in People magazine about her relationship with John F. Kennedy).

Bonk expressed her dismay that, with less than 10% of national TV network correspondents female, election year issues are being defined “primarily by men for male audiences.” This, she said, means trade is a higher priority than family and child care.

Still ‘Too Upscale, White’

As women do make it to the top in media, how will images of women change? Steenland expressed her concern that “we are still far too upscale and too white and too professional in terms of women” characters.

How will selection of subject matter be affected if women have more power? These, too, were topics of broad-ranging discussion.

The feminization of television and its sensitization have gone hand in hand, said TV producer Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”). On that program, he noted, “If Dad makes dinner, he doesn’t even get credit for it. I don’t think guys would ever have sat down and come up with bulimia as the subject for an episode,” as “Family Ties” did.

Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Oscar-Grammy-Emmy award winning composers and husband and wife for 30 years, spoke of a new sensitivity to equality reflected in lyrics. The Bergmans, he said, would never have written “A Fellow Needs a Girl,” an Oscar Hammerstein tune in which that girl is someone who will “sit by his side and listen to him talk and agree with the things he’ll say.”

‘Girl’ Would Be ‘Dog’

If they’d written it, quipped Marilyn Bergman, they would have substituted “dog” for “girl.”

Alan Bergman criticized the way a few people at a few radio stations control which records will get exposure and become big sellers and, the Bergmans agreed, “there are no women in powerful positions in the record business” to change that.

All the talk of women’s images in the media had troubled one man in the audience, Dean Loomos, a 41-year-old local free-lance writer. He thought men had been addressed at this conference as some sort of monolithic white power structure. In all the discussion of sex objects, he asked, what about the pressure on men as “success objects?”

Tuesday night’s closing session, with actor Richard Dreyfuss as a panelist, included lively debate on current films and what they’re saying about women. Marcia Kinder, a cinema/television professor at USC, attacked “Fatal Attraction” on the basis that the Glenn Close character is a monster who subliminally embodies feminism but Michael Douglas, the wayward husband, is “home free” at the end--and still very desirable.

Summing Up

Marlene Sanders, host of Currents, a weekly public affairs series on WNET-TV in New York and a former ABC anchor, summed up what she’d been hearing during the three days--the need for women to network, to become re-energized, the conviction that boycotts can be effective but censorship is not acceptable, the need for grass-roots organizing.

Finally, Betty Friedan suggested a plan “to put the spotlight on the glass ceiling,” a proposal to form a national steering committee on Women, Men and Media to monitor how women are being treated by, and in, the media.

It is clear, she said later, that “there is a need to articulate the new problems,” a need for “a resurgence of action,” for identifying isolated incidents that are emerging as a pattern, for combatting a “serious backlash.”

She will begin, she said, by asking the Californians who spoke here to correspond with women in other states. The “probable result”: a second conference, next year in Washington.

“Women, Men and Media” was sponsored by the USC School of Journalism, the USC Institute for the Study of Women and Men, the Gannett Foundation, Women in Film and Times Mirror.