Talk with ExpertsFOREIGN PRESS USAMarch 02, 2023Women, Gender Inequality, Inequality, Best Practices

Getting More Diverse Perspectives from Women of Color in Your Stories

Talk with ExpertsFOREIGN PRESS USAMarch 02, 2023Women, Gender Inequality, Inequality, Best Practices

Newsrooms are less diverse than the U.S. working population overall. White men are over-represented in newsrooms, which leads to an excessive amount of bias in newsrooms (and specifically, editors) deciding which stories to run and which stories to not. One of the most underrepresented demographics in newsrooms nationwide, especially among editors and executives, is women of color.

Women of color are less likely to be editors or editors-in-chief even in diverse countries. According to a report by journalist Luba Kassova, “1 in 4 editors-in-chief (26%) across the six countries of focus (India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, and the US) are women. This is marginally lower than the global average more than a decade ago.” For every woman in the editor-in-chief position, there are between two and twelve men holding that same position in these countries of focus.

When the focus is shifted to women of color, this figure is even lower. From Kassova’s report:

“In the UK, no women of color occupy the most senior editorial decision-making positions in the key high-profile news beats of politics, foreign affairs, and health. Women of color are severely marginalized in the US compared to their proportion in the working population: 3%, 4%, 6%, and 9% of the political, foreign, health, and economics/ business editors in the US are women of color, which is 7, 5, 4, and 2 times fewer than their proportion in the working population.
In South Africa, if the representation of women of color in editorial roles matched their proportion in the working population, the number of women of color would be 2 times higher in economics/business editor roles, 2.2 times higher in political editor roles and 1.2 times higher in health editors roles.”

With this disparity, how do newsrooms and journalists act to diversify the perspectives and stories they include in their bodies of work? The first thing Kassova suggests is to allow more conversations about gender issues into the newsroom. According to Kassova’s research, “the majority of the interviewees [for this report] (61%) recognized the gender blindness within news that indicates that reporters may simply not see the gender angles inherent in the stories they are covering (e.g. the gender ramifications of particular economic policies or new political or health legislation).” This means exploring new information and new angles of any story through the lens of gender and oppression: for example, what are the greater implications for women of color—who are up against a greater amount of intersectional oppression—when the price of insulin was raised over 600 percent between 2001 and 2021? What will the new legal price cap of insulin—at $35 per unit—do in relation to women of color?

A quick look at statistics already shows that people of color, specifically Black people, are over 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime. However, women are only half as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes as men. This puts the conversation in the intersection of gender and race and considers the greater implications across the board while diversifying the perspective on “insulin was really expensive, but now the price is going down.”

Kassova also warns that white male-dominated news produces less human interest works or works with available human interest angles. A report on diversity and inclusion regarding journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that of articles released early in the pandemic, just 9 percent contained a human interest angle. “AKAS’ data research uncovered that micro and human interest stories within the big political, economic or health stories -- which appeal to women more -- are often missed out,” Kassova wrote. Also, while the pandemic disproportionately affected people of color, with Black and Hispanic people about twice as likely to die from the virus as their White counterparts, very few articles indeed contained perspectives from folks of color on the pandemic.

If these perspectives are being constantly omitted, Kassova recommends setting up a chain of intervention so that women in the workplace are able to contribute their perspectives to pieces that are otherwise missing it. Appointing newsroom inclusion officers who have editorial responsibilities, and who come from a background of “key political, economic, foreign affairs, and health stories,” is one major way Kassova suggests allowing for organic intervention in newsrooms. “One senior news editor reported how creating a 100-strong team of inclusion champions across their newsroom ‘just changed the tenor of our coverage, the conversations around coverage,’” she wrote.

Journalism surely has a long way to go in terms of making these changes and making them stick. But as journalists are advocates for their own communities, they must advocate for others perspectives’ to be heard while allowing those perspectives to be in conversation with their own bodies of work. Only then can marginalized people begin to then see their experiences represented, thoughtfully and accurately, in the media.

FOREIGN PRESS USA