Women Pessimistic About Moving Up At Newspapers, Plan Fresh Starts

Just one in five of the nation's top female editors say they definitely want to move up in the newspaper industry. Almost one in two anticipate a fresh start, saying they expect to leave either their company or the news business entirely.

This is considerably more than the one in three men, who say they definitely want to move up in the industry or expect to leave either their company or their careers in the news business.

Electoral Coverage of Women Candidates: Two Races Show the Difficulties

Two hotly contested races in this year's electoral scene illustrated the difficulties of women candidates trying to skirt classic stereotypes that weaken their chances of prevailing at the polls.

Women, War and War Correspondence: Veterans Show Us Lessons to be Learned

If the Washington officials itching for war would stop their chest-thumping for a moment, they could learn a great deal from women journalists who've covered conflict and experienced its unspeakable horrors - enough, perhaps, to dampen their enthusiasm for war and its consequences.

The women's voices are rising now in the forms of a memoir and an awards presentation, both of which draw attention to the enormous risks they've taken to tell the world that war causes unspeakable suffering.

Boxed In: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Prime-Time TV

Media scholar Martha Lauzen has again tabulated the numbers of women working on prime-time entertainment programming, and the numbers still aren't good.

Men wrote and created approximately 8 of 10 situation comedies and dramas airing on the broadcast networks in the 2001-2002 prime-time season. Overall, women constituted 23% of all creators, executive producers, directors, writers, editors and directors of photography last season. This percentage has remained virtually unchanged for the last three seasons, Lauzen says. However, the representation of women writers declined dramatically last season, dipping from 27% in 2000-2001 to 19% in 2001-2002.

Television News Pipeline Remains Narrow For Women, Experience Notwithstanding

The waiting game continues for women broadcast journalists. Their shot at at least one network anchor job was eliminated this past summer when MSNBC anchor Brian Williams was anointed the successor to NBC veteran anchor Tom Brokaw. We can assume that CBS and ABC also eventually will tap attractive white males to succeed Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Experienced women network correspondents will continue to cover the weekend and warm the seat for the lead anchor on his days off.

It's a disappointment to many women with thousands of hours of TV news reporting experience to their credit. Their dismay was articulated by FOX anchor Greta Van Susteren, quoted in The New York Times June 23, who said, "There are 280 million people in this country. Surely they can find one smart woman to deliver the news."

Pakistan Media Project Aims To Change Attitudes Toward Women

An initiative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has passed the five-year mark in helping Pakistani media examine the way women are portrayed and develop more balanced and positive approaches.

The project has trained 400 media professionals, helping them develop ways to present women in Pakistan in a new light in programs aired by the Pakistan Television Corporation. The goal is to ensure that TV productions are sensitive to the issue of gender and avoid reinforcing biases against women, and men as well. Research shows that women are frequently depicted as weak, dependent and uninformed, while men are portrayed as aggressive, manipulative and insensitive.

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