Women in Journalism

Press Gazette reported on November 28 that Women in Journalism (WIJ) relaunched its website.

Women in Journalism is a networking, campaigning, training and social organisation for women journalists who work across all the written media, from newspapers and magazines to the new media.

WIJ was established 12 years ago. It grew out of a demand for women to be more effectively represented at senior level in newspapers and magazines, and has since evolved into a forum for women in journalism at all levels.

The organization boasts its contribution to a significant increase in the number of women editors and deputy editors in national newspapers.

It also organizes bi-monthly seminars to give women journalists chances to think about 'How to ask for more money', 'What features editors want', 'Get your own column' and 'How to write a bestseller'.

10 years ago in Korea

I began working as a reporter in 1996 at the Kukmin Daily in Seoul. The Kukmin recruited 6 reporters in that year including myself, a half of whom were female. Such a ratio of men to women was unprecedented in the male-dominating industry.

The imbalance in gender was the problem of not only mains stream media but also new media that started to appear on the Internet in the early 2000s. The citizen reporters of Ohmynews were also a male-dominating group. According to the company’s 2003 statistics, 76.6% of them were male.

New Trend?

However, the trend has changed for the past decade. More and more women has applied for jobs in the media for the past years. Their competitiveness surpasses that of male applicants in most cases.

Therefore, Korean media have difficulty in recruiting male reporters because fewer of them defeat women competitors at examinations for recruiting journalists. Some companies give advantages to male applicants to strike a gender balance.

I remember that I was surprised by the dominant number of women at the first meeting of Sheffield University’s new MA journalism students in last September.

I told one of the female students how I was surprised but she replied “It’s natural. Whichever country or university you go to, journalism is a women’s subject.”

Why Women Love Journalism?

Elizabeth Day, a female reporter for The Sunday Telegraph, contributed an article to British Journalism Review in 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 21-25). Its title was Why Women Love Journalism?

I think she is the right person to answer this question. She was named Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March, 2004, thanks to both her hunger for exclusives and her stylish writing. Please read her article!

Two Realities

I agree to the argument that women are ill-represented in senior posts of media industry. But the new trends that I witnessed in Seoul and Sheffield are sure to reflect the reality.