Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they aren't covered

So I read Alternet's piece today, "Women on the List" and the author has this to say of the women at the top of Forbes' "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women" list:

It's not that they're not important people--they certainly are--it's just that the media have not made them household names.

For the record, those women are: Condoleezza Rice, Wu Yi, Yulia Tymoshenko, Gloria Arroyo, Margaret Whitman, Anne Mulcahy, Sallie Krawcheck, Brenda Barnes, Oprah Winfrey and Melinda Gates.

I'm just going to get this out there first: The American media is supposed to make  China's vice premier, the Ukraine's prime minister and the Phillipines' president into household names? When many Americans have no apparent interest in even identifying their own local, state and national elected representatives?

And now, moving on. As the author does, I'm going to toss Gates, Rice and Winfrey from the "the media doesn't cover them" charge, because ... well, that's silly. But let's take a look at how everyone else fares in searches of major U.S. newspaper and wire services:

• Wu Yi -- 102 cites since 93
• Yulia Tymoshenko -- 449 cites since 97
• Gloria Arroyo -- 997 cites since 81
• Margaret Whitman -- or, as her colleagues like to call her at EBay, "Meg." As "Margaret Whitman," she had 243 accurate cites going back to 92. Searches for "Meg Whitman" ground to a halt, producing over 1000 results.
• Anne Mulcahy -- 829 accurate cites since 95
• Sallie Krawcheck -- 298 cites since 98.
• Brenda Barnes -- 651 cites since 82

Now, I'm going to assume a 10% rate of name confusion -- there's more than one Brenda Barnes in the U.S., for example -- and toss out the "Meg Whitman" results for the time being. That's still 3212 media mentions of 7 people over the past 24 years. It's worth noting that some, like Krawcheck, haven't even had a 24-year career yet.

My point is that even within this limited (and admittedly imprecise) set of search parameters, there actually has been media coverage. I imagine if I threw open the search to magazines, speciality publications or international newspapers, the numbers would go up.

Look, I have some well-documented issues with the way women get covered in the media -- the unquestioning assumption that our bodies' aesthetics are open for public commentary, the fetishization of motherhood. But I think it's important to raise another possibility here: if you don't know about the CEO of EBay, maybe it's not that she's not being covered. Maybe you're not reading the right news sources.

The Alternet article says:

Women's media profile, in fact, is so low that if this were a list of the world's most powerful people--male or female--very few on this list would make the lineup, since men dominate the airwaves and newspapers to such a profound degree.

For years, study after study has put newspaper front-page mentions of women in a range of between 20 percent and 25 percent, with women having less visibility in business and sports sections, somewhat more in metro and lifestyle pages.

But is this true now? Where are the years and the percentages tracked? Cite the sources.

Until I see facts, I can only offer hypotheses for why you see so few women in the sports and business sections of general-interest newspapers. In the former, it's because many of the sports pages are focused on the business and culture of sports -- i.e. pro sports that generate a lot of primary and secondary revenue -- and those sports are currently male-dominated. Change the focus of the sports section, and you'd probably see greater gender parity. However, the question is whether you'd also lose readership.

As for business sections: I'd be curious to see whether a study of most business sections confirms my hunch -- that much of the coverage is in publicly-traded firms, where there is still a noticeable gender gap.

It's been established by other groups that women are the fastest-growing group of small business owners ("Women Lead the Start-Up Stats," BW, Nov 29, 04) -- but unless those small business owners are rocking industries the same way execs do at a publicly-held titan, how do you square the coverage?

(By the way: it's not like the corporate world is unaware of the talent drain -- read The Economist's "The Conundrum of the Glass Ceiling" (July 21, 05) for a look at the topic. But my hypothesis stands: a lot of business news is focused on publicly-held businesses, and those are grappling with serious gender gaps at the top.)

But the final irritant in this story -- putting aside the imprecision about gender proportionality in news coverage, putting aside the fundamental premise "If I have never heard of them, the media must be doing a crappy job covering them" -- is this:

All of us would benefit by knowing more about the women Forbes has called the world's most powerful, and about the work they do and the lives they influence.

And right there on the list are media executives who could use their high visibility and clout to make that happen.

In addition to Winfrey and Moore, plus NBC's Katie Couric (No. 47) and ABC's Diane Sawyer (No. 55), there is a full dozen more: Marjorie Scardino, CEO, Pearson (No. 18); Anne Sweeney, president, Disney-ABC Television Group (No. 33); Judy McGrath, CEO, MTV Networks (No. 49); Amy Pascal, vice chair, Motion Picture Group, Sony Entertainment (No. 50); Stacey Snider, chair, Universal Pictures, (No. 59); Gail Berman, president, Paramount Pictures (No. 69); Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNN (No. 72); Karen Elliott House, publisher, The Wall Street Journal, (No. 73); Janet Robinson, CEO, The New York Times Co (No. 77); Christie Hefner, CEO, Playboy Enterprises (No. 90); Cathleen Black, president, Hearst Magazines, (No. 91); and Martha Nelson, managing editor, People (No. 92).

So, OK sisters, how about it?

And this goad to gender solidarity, to strive for a goal that may not exist (because hi, we've covered that these people get mentioned in the media), is what gets me. Look at the media execs on the list. How many of the 16 media execs roped into the sisterhood traffic in anything other than entertainment-oriented media? THREE.

I find it inherently contradictory to bemoan not knowing a lot about financial or international titanesses -- and then to call on the head of the MTV Networks to redress that knowledge gap.

There is always, always going to be a fit between topic and media organ, targeted toward a specific audience. The problem is not that People isn't running pieces on Sallie Krawcheck. The problem would expecting People to do so in a way that explains why she's newsworthy.

Comments

[Monty]

I think any article that starts with the assumption that Condoleeza Rice and Oprah Winfrey -- Oprah Winfrey! -- aren't household names is probably silly.

I mean, do they want Oprah to be even more famous? Is that even possible?

[Lisa]

I suppose it is:

"I want the cosmos to rearrange itself so that Orion turns into Oprah's nose! Let her be fixed in the firmament like the goddess she is!"

But it seems like a long shot.

[molly]

It saddens me to see girls reading Cosmo when The Economist is available. The Economist (the article you mentioned was excellent too, BTW) would provide girls a much better foundation than Cosmo would anyday. An article on a new intellectual-property business model would be far more useful in future business than 100 sexy things men love.....but I guess it depends on what business the girl aspires to join.

And doesn't everyone want to know that Indonesia is at a crossroad?