Women Hold Just 6% of Top Media Jobs, Are Paid Less, Report Finds

Women hold only 6% of the top jobs in the news media and 25% of the middle-management jobs, according to a report released here Monday at a conference on “Women, Men and Media.”

The research, financed primarily by the Gannett Foundation, which sponsored the conference, also found that a woman in the media earns 64 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

“Not only are women ignored at jobs in the media, they are slighted in coverage as well,” the report said.

The researchers said they studied photos, bylines and news sources in 10 newspapers in March and found that 27% of the byline stories on the front pages were written by women, that 24% of the photos showed women, usually with their families, and that 11% of those quoted in the papers were women.

Using this standard, the researchers ranked the newspapers from “best to worst,” as follows:

USA Today was rated first and the Houston Chronicle and Atlanta Constitution tied for second, followed, in order, by the Seattle Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chicago Tribune and New York Times.

A study of nightly network newscasts found that from 1975 to 1989, the proportion of news correspondents who are women rose from 9.9% to 15.8%, the report said. It said the percentages of news reports filed by women in February were 22.2% on CBS, 14.4% on NBC and 10.5% on ABC.

The percentages of stories that focused on women were 13.7% on ABC, 10.2% on CBS and 8.9% on NBC, the survey found.