No Progress For Women in Communications
Companies in Past Year

Women still constitute just 15% of executive leaders and just 12% of board members in top communications companies - numbers virtually unchanged from the previous year, according to the third annual report on women leaders in communication companies conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania and released in December.

The study examined board members, top executives, and women-friendly benefits at the 57 Fortune 500 communications companies. It included 25 telecom, 18 publishing and printing, 11 entertainment, and 3 advertising companies.

Among the key findings:

• Publishing companies (18%) edged out telecommunications (16%) and entertainment firms (12%) for the greatest average percent of women in executive positions. The advertising firms had the lowest average number of women in executive positions (3%).

• Publishing companies tended to have more women on their boards than others, with women comprising an average of 18%. That was followed by telecommunications, advertising, and entertainment, which averaged 10%, 9%, and 8% respectively.

View the full report at www.appcpenn.org

Media Watch Succeeds in Discouraging
DaimlerChrysler Support of 'Lingerie Bowl'

Hats off and a deep bow to Ann Simonton, founder of Media Watch in Santa Cruz, Calif. She got the ball rolling to discourage DaimlerChrysler from its Dodge division's sponsorship of the "Lingerie Bowl," an insipid "game" between teams of underdressed actresses and models that was available on pay-per-view during halftime during the Super Bowl (although for free, you could have seen Janet Jackson's breast.) Simonton sent an alert to her listserv on Dec. 7, urging people to write to the auto company to protest its support of the tawdry event.

A good account of this effort, plus a review of Simonton's other successes in reducing exploitation of women, is provided by Michael Stoll's article, "Getting results with low-budget activism," posted Jan. 21, 2004 at www.stanford.edu/group/gradethenews/pages2/Simonton_printversion.htm

NYT Book Review Favors Books,
Reviews by Men, Researchers Say

A new study from says The New York Times Book Review overwhelmingly favors books and book reviews written by men.

The study by Brown University adjunct professor Paula Caplan and psychotherapist Mary Ann Palko looked at 53 issues of the Sunday book review published consecutively between 2002 and 2003. They found that 72 percent of all books reviewed were written by men and 66 percent of all reviews carried a male byline.

Boston Globe Ombudsman: Newspapers Need
To Find Neutral Ground in Abortion Debate

Boston Globe Ombudsman Christine Chinlund attempted to steer a neutral path for reporters through the loaded terminology of discussions of abortion in her column of Nov. 3, 2003.

"'Prochoice' has a lofty sound to it - everyone knows choice is good, right? - so newspapers use the more detached 'abortion rights advocate' instead. Likewise, a 'prolife' advocate becomes an 'abortion opponent' in print."

With last fall's Congressional vote on the so-called partial-birth abortion ban came, Chinlund said, "a new set of word-choice problems."

"Although 'intact dilation and extraction' is the medical term most often used for the to-be-banned procedure, the bill is widely known by a more graphic phrase - 'partial-birth abortion.' Indeed, abortion foes wrote that name into their legislation from the start and made it the title.

"So what should a newspaper do? Use the neutral but not commonly recognized medical term or use the more graphic phrase - which fails the neutrality test but is the official name and the one readers easily recognize?"

Research in Depth:

Sylvia on Sundays, Feminism on Fridays: Breakthrough in Cartoons

The character Sylvia as her readers know her today made her way into "The Feminist Funnies" on October 15, 1976. While the figure lying in her recliner before the television was "not yet named, her politics a little shaky, her profile undeveloped," she is undoubtedly the Sylvia her readers know and love, "with backless mules and cigarette firmly in place."

When Chicago-native Nicole Hollander began sketching for the small feminist publication The Spokeswoman in 1976, little did she know that her foray into the comic strip world, appropriately titled "The Feminist Funnies," would lead her to forsake her career as a graphic artist and move into a profession that was historically the province of men. This analysis of Sylvia's impact was written by Nicole Maurantonio, a third-year Ph.D student in history and communications at the University of Pennsylvania. She firstpresented this paper at the International Communication Association (ICA) annual conference in May 2003 as part of the Feminist Scholarship Division

Feminism and Hollywood: Why the Backlash?

There are a number of key issues that most would agree are important for feminism and representations in film, such as the presence of women in central roles in a variety of genres; the narrowness of the acceptable age-range, size, sexuality, race, and appearance of women on screen; whether women assume roles of equal power and status to those held by men; and the possibility that there has been a gradual transformation in the agenda and topics central to traditional genres, from hetero-normative families to those who are not necessarily so. The authors of this paper sought to focus on these and highlight how they have been treated, and representations transformed, in the most popular mainstream films. Over the last several decades a number of feminist films have been produced, most of them independently made, or made outside of the United States. But this analysis considers the way feminist ideas appear or don't appear in Hollywood films. The authors are Andrea Press, research professor of Communications and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, and Tamar Liebes-Plesner is professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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