Asked to speak at the WWAFE House of Lords seminar, as I first began to muse about the issue a few weeks ago, I decided to put a call out on Facebook to elicit some observations from the many female colleagues I left behind in Australian media – and the many more I have met since my posting as a foreign correspondent to London in 2008. How did they see their profession when they began? Have things changed for those of us who are well into our careers?
And what about the youngest cohort, those who have entered the fray as the digital revolution continues to shake the industry to its core?
While many of us have busted barriers to report from war zones the world over, how many women have managed to infiltrate media boardrooms or editor’s offices and publisher’s top floor suites?
That first call out for anecdotes was an incredible eye opener. I thought I might glean a few good stories, even a few jokes. But what I heard, often messaged almost with a sense of apology to me in private, saddened and shocked me.
Before I head down that path, let me tell you a little of my own professional trajectory. I began as a young, trainee journalist on Australia’s oldest and most august broadsheet daily in the middle of 1981 – the last undergraduate, Italian born and the only non Australian rookie. Six months later, a colleague of Hungarian Jewish background joined as a trainee and she – a trailblazing feminist – and I laughed the other night about being The Sydney Morning Herald‘s ‘token ethnics’ of the time. When I started at the paper, stories were written on manual typewriters, every page of the eight-ply carbon paper allowed to contain just two paragraphs to ease the sub-editing and production process. Every day, we bloodied our thumbs pushing pins through the great wads of paper that made a whole article. The paper’s printing presses thrummed to life three or four times throughout the night but once the last edition was in bed that was it, another day was over. I will always remember the excitement of the facsimile machine and what we called gram machines, great big heavy drums that transmitted photographs via a telephone line at the speed of a snail on tranquillizers.
Now, as a correspondent covering Europe for Australian newspapers just two decades later, news can break and I will be able to get it out, into the ether or on our websites, sometimes in seconds. These days, the news cycle runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have filed stories from the strangest places: Congo River, the remotest foothills of the Himalayas, an earthquake torn mountain village in Italy and from 40,000 feet above the earth in a plane carrying Pope Benedict and a cabal – I’m not sure that is the collective noun for Cardinals!
In an effort to quantify change specifically for women in media, I hunted down a former editor of the time, one of Australia’s finest – and, it turns out, something of a newspaper historian. He told me that in the year I joined The Sydney Morning Herald, there were 180 journalist writing the paper – of which 39 or 22 per cent – were women.
Thirty years later, work done by Australian academic, Dr Louise North, and published last year reveals that there has been a slight improvement – but women still occupy only 30 per cent of the editorial positions at the Herald. There has been a technological – but not a gender – revolution.
I’m fairly sure that the year I began in what I still feel is the best job in the world was also the year the paper celebrated its 150th birthday. Three decades – 30 years! – would pass before the first female editor was appointed – and she lasted less than two years, removed in a purge in 2012 which saw her replaced with two men!
Chatting to colleagues and editors who also began their careers in the 1980s, I realized that my generation was at the pointy end of huge changes for women in news and yet most of us were pretty much oblivious that what we were doing was trying to change the world. One reminded me with great gusto of the daily battle in news conference – the place where editors, mostly male, meet twice a day to create the newslist and place stories. The fight was never ending to get placement for stories about equal pay and equal opportunity, welfare, reproductive rights, balancing family life, stories about childbirth, about breast feeding into the paper, let alone onto page one alongside the nation’s male dominated political affairs. One year, this same colleague reminded me, childcare fees rocketed by 25 per cent in one go – none of us even had kids then but she remembers it took a full week of lobbying to get an editor (whose wife happened to be a feminist and mum of two young children) – to agree to running the story, let alone putting it on page one where it belonged.
Over the next decade, we fought and won a battle for purpose built childcare at work, we watched the election of a trickle of women to the nation’s parliaments, seethed with fury as the first female Deputy Opposition Leader in a Lower House was literally driven out of politics by the mysoginist language and political attacks by a Premier who is remembered also as one of Australia’s most erudite, eloquent and reforming QCs.
And national research shows still that in Australia today, women even now manage to get just 30 per cent of newspaper bylines on page one – and it’s the same percentage if you look at the main focus of news stories. As my trailblazer colleague says it’s still ‘news about blokes, by blokes.’
And yet, eight years ago, when I was appointed Editor of the Saturday edition of the Herald – the one with the biggest circulation and fattest income – the last thing I thought of myself was being a pioneer. I remember feeling that somehow, I had not earned it, was a fraud soon to be found out, felt amazingly thankful when my salary was given an unexpectedly big hoik. I suspect a male colleague would have asked for even more, out of principle. It’s funny because looking back, I now see that I was – and still am – one of a mere handful of women appointed to executive, decision making positions in Australian media – but somehow I didn’t feel I deserved it. I don’t think I am alone in these secret misgivings and thoughts.
Paola Totaro (c) March 2013
Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.
