RADIO : Drive Time Isn’t Prime Time for Women : Females deliver news, weather and traffic reports, but when it comes to wacky antics, the a.m. is a man’s domain

Flip across the radio dial on any weekday morning and you’ll be treated to the wacky antics of KLOS’ Mark and Brian, the controversial rantings of KLSX “shock jock” Howard Stern, the boyish pranks of KIIS’ Rick Dees, the easygoing banter of KABC’s Ken and Barkley, the goofiness of KTNQ’s Humberto Luna.

What you won’t hear in any substantial capacity are female voices.

Only one major Los Angeles-based radio station, KFI-AM (640), has women hosting a morning “drive-time” program by themselves--Tracy Miller and Terri-Rae Elmer. Kim Amidon is co-host--with Mark Wallengren--at KOST-FM (103.5), and Sylvia Aimerito co-hosts with three men at KBIG-FM (104.3). There also are a few women sidekicks, such as Robin Quivers, Howard Stern’s giggly version of Ed McMahon, and Ellen K., one of a couple of players on Rick Dees’ show. Mostly, however, women in the morning are only heard delivering news, weather and traffic reports.

In short, despite their presence behind the microphones at all other times of the day, women are largely absent as star players during radio’s prime-time period (5-10 a.m.).

“Where,” asks former KMET-FM disc jockey Cynthia Fox, “are the ‘Thelma & Louise’ of morning radio?”

“Morning drive seems to be a male domain,” said Jim Duncan, an Indianapolis-based radio consultant and publisher of “American Radio” and several books on the broadcast industry. “I think that’s true everywhere, not just in Southern California.”

“The female is always talked about as some kind of second banana,” said Rick Cummings, vice president of programming for Emmis Broadcasting, which owns dance station KPWR-FM (105.9) and seven other stations across the country. “She’s there to do the news and be the foil for some morning guy. Or she’s there to pull him in line when he becomes sexist. But her role is always there in some shape or form to play off the male partner.”

Those who make their living in radio offer no single explanation for this disparity. Rather, they postulate a variety of theories ranging from an inherent male bias on the part of those in charge, to women not being socialized to aspire to the job of wacky morning deejay, to the notion that both men and women prefer the sound of a male voice in the mornings.

“I think that women are socialized to not be as outrageous as men,” said KOST’s Amidon. “We’re socialized that women are supposed to be sophisticated and sexy. They’re not going to be like Howard Stern. . . . I know I think twice about doing things that Mark doesn’t hesitate to do. I don’t know what the reason is, really. Maybe we’ve had a lack of role models.”

Veteran deejay Raechel Donahue lays the blame squarely on the conservative tendencies of station managers.

“I just think radio people are really into the tried-and-true, whatever has traditionally been done,” said Donahue, currently heard from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on KSRF “MARS-FM” (103.1). “I’ve always tried to change things, but it takes an exceptional manager to give you a break. It’s not like they’ll come up to you and say, ‘You want to do morning radio?’ You have to beat the guys over the head and show them it can be done.”

Donahue is one of several women who has had an unsuccessful morning solo shot in Los Angeles. Radio industry officials can point to only one woman who has been the sole star of a successful morning show: Shock jock Caroline Fox, often called the female Howard Stern, was a top-rated morning personality during her tenure at WHJY-FM in Providence, R.I., from 1982 to 1990, when she left to raise her infant daughter.

Fox, who now has a weekend radio shift at WBCN in Boston, said that the Rhode Island rock station was floundering in the ratings when she persuaded the program director to take a chance on her. She contends that women deejays themselves are responsible for not winning morning jobs.

“It’s not the men running the stations who are to blame,” she said. “We have ourselves to blame. That’s where the homework has to be done. . . . Women aren’t brought up to be funny and sassy and sarcastic. Women must get their act together in the humor and creativity department and not settle on being a sidekick.”

Morning shows are the most mysterious, least predictable and costliest aspect of radio, said Cummings of Emmis Broadcasting. For that reason, station managers and program directors are all the more risk averse, preferring to imitate what has worked on other stations.

“I don’t think any of us really understand the dynamics of what makes a morning show work,” Cummings said. “We have put on the most talented people in the country and sometimes they worked and sometimes they failed miserably. . . . I’ve heard many people speculate that women don’t have the credibility with a general audience to carry (a morning show). But I don’t believe that. On the other hand, I can’t say we’ve got any morning shows with a woman who is prominent. We just don’t.”

Consultant Duncan hypothesized that women (who, according to ratings data, listen to morning radio in slightly larger numbers than men) prefer to hear male voices in the mornings. Many women deejays say they’ve been told that repeatedly by male executives.

Such concern is not without foundation.

“Personally, I like turning on the radio and hearing a man,” said Ellen K., Dees’ sidekick at KIIS-FM (102.7). “I guess it’s just something with authority. I think that if I turned it on and I heard just a woman I would think she was sort of masculine.”

So prevalent is the belief that male voices are preferred in the morning that Tracey Miller admits she was skeptical about the wisdom of accepting KFI’s offer last year to team with Terry-Rae Elmer on a morning show there.

“When KFI first offered it to me, I thought, ‘They’re taking a real risk here,’ ” Miller said. “I, too, was a victim of thinking that women would find me threatening and men would find me obnoxious and I’d end up with no ratings and be laughed at.”

Miller and Elmer are getting ratings, but low ones. Their show ranked 18th in the most recent Arbitron ratings survey, which roughly translates to about 2.3% of the radio audience, or about 55,400 people. But KFI’s morning slot has not drawn a large audience for several years and has undergone a series of personnel changes during that time. Indeed, when KFI General Manager Howard Neal decided to put the two women on in August, 1990, he was simply trying to breathe life into the franchise.

“I think that one of the reasons that we took the risk of putting on females in the morning was because it was something different,” Neal said. “When you have as much competition in radio as we have in Los Angeles, you look for a niche. You look for something that others may not be doing. And I think (Miller and Elmer) have probably as much talent, as much insight and as much feel for the marketplace as a male host would.”

While other women disc jockeys acknowledge Miller and Elmer’s presence, most don’t perceive it as a major breakthrough because the two are primarily doing a news-and-talk program--which has been a more traditional domain for women--rather than a comedic, personality-based show.

“They are still straight men,” said Raechel Donahue. “We still don’t have anybody on the air doing wild and wacky morning radio shows. When will women get wild and wacky?”

For a while, in the early ‘80s, it appeared that women were going to get that chance. Around the time that Caroline Fox got her morning job in Providence, a few women managed to forge their way onto the morning airwaves in Los Angeles. None lasted long.

Donahue, after much lobbying, finally persuaded management at the now-defunct KWST-FM to put her in the morning slot in 1981. She got another chance at KLOS-FM (95.5) in 1986.

In 1984, the two top Los Angeles rock stations gave women a shot at morning shows. Shana Livigni and Chuck Moshontz had a morning drive program on KLOS-FM, and Cynthia Fox and Pat (Parraquat) Kelly were teamed on KMET-FM.

Rita Wilde also was assigned to mornings for about a year at KLOS in 1987, but was told from the outset that it was only until management found someone else. (KLOS replaced her with the now top-rated duo of Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps; Wilde is currently the regular vacation relief disc jockey at the station.)

“There were a lot of women doing morning drive then, a lot more women,” said Livigni, who now has the 11 a.m.-2 p.m. shift at KLSX (97.1). “All of a sudden there was this surge. I have no idea how that came about. Maybe they just wanted to be different. . . . What women do you hear on morning drive now? It’s middays and nights. I don’t know what happened.”

“I think that what happened was that those weren’t really morning personalities,” said Jeff Pollack, a radio consultant whose Santa Monica-based firm handles about 70 stations nationwide. “They weren’t really designed to do morning shows. . . . I think those stations put those people on because it was more of a novelty, not really because it was a long-term solution.”

The women involved contend that they were never given a chance to be themselves.

Donahue said that she quit her KLOS job in 1986, leaving behind a “six-figure salary,” because the station’s demands were too restrictive. “They wanted me to be sort of an imitator of a man’s show and I didn’t want to be a part of that,” she said. “I didn’t feel they were offering me an opportunity to be anything more than a bimbo.”

Cynthia Fox said that when she was given the morning slot at hard-rocking KMET, known for its renegade image, the program director instructed her to model herself after a host of ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.”

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we’re playing Black Sabbath and Aerosmith and you want me to do a ‘Good Morning America’ approach?’ It just seemed completely, stylistically wrong,” Fox recalled. “We were supposed to be taking chances and going over the edge and being strange. But they said, ‘We want you to tone it down, be sort of low-key. I was told, ‘Don’t be funny.’ I thought that was nuts.”

“There is just not enough support for women to get free and crazy and be themselves,” Fox said. “That’s all I’ve wanted to do and it’s just been a battle.”

Fox faced another battle in 1987 when she did a second morning stint, this time solo, on the now-defunct rock station KMPC-FM. She was cautioned not to mention her pregnancy on the air because she might alienate male listeners.

“I really wanted to joke about the pregnancy, the things that are scary and are so ludicrous sometimes,” she said. “I wanted to hear from the listeners who had gone through it, to say, ‘If you’re out there and you’re pregnant, I’m with you, baby, let’s have some saltines together.’ But I was advised at the time to not talk about it because I was told that guys would no longer find me a fantasy figure and it would just alienate them. I’ve never been the kind of person who wants to be seen as some kind of sex goddess. I don’t want to be some icon putting on some bedroom voice.”

But bedroom voices are just what many radio programmers have wanted to hear when they hire women disc jockeys. Consequently, those with the throatiest voices and most suggestive deliveries tend to be confined to late-night slots.

The difficulty that women are having breaking down the morning-drive barrier was once the norm for any on-air radio job.

“In the ‘70s, nobody would hire a woman,” Livigni said. “You’d apply and they’d say, ‘No, we already have our woman.’ Then a new (FCC) rule said you have to hire women, and they all hired women for overnights.”

So, in time, will things change in the mornings as well?

Some women deejays said they are not holding their breath.

“I would love to say that I think we’re going to advance in radio, but I don’t think it’s going to happen soon,” KFI’s Miller said. “I think we are an oddity. I think we’ll remain an oddity for a while because it’s still a male-dominated medium. I think we’ll still be pigeonholed in traffic and news, and the lesser, more subordinate positions.”

Others said they believed there will be female morning stars in the not-too-distant future.

“Now that there are more female comics, I’ve got to think that there’s going to be women ready to go for the morning show,” said consultant Pollack. “I think definitely in the next five years there will be more women doing morning shows. They’ll sound different and have a different view and a different perspective.”

“Eventually there will be a woman (hosting a morning show alone),” said KBIG’s Sylvia Aimerito. “Things are looking up for women. Some of the stigmas are gone. For a while there was this unwritten rule that there could only be one woman on at a radio station, and that’s not the case anymore. Then there was the unwritten rule that if there was a woman on, she should just do the news, and that’s not true anymore. So, little by little, these things are breaking down.”