Women are the majority of journalism students but a distinct minority in management.
by Dwayne Winseck
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting my research on telecom, media and internet concentration to several women from Canadian Women in Communication, an organization that strives to raise the profile and honour the achievements of women in the telecom, media and technology industries in Canada.
The organization does so through professional development and mentoring programs as well as by creating partnerships with industry, government and other organizations. It also does so, as its website indicates, through “high profile initiatives like Women on Boards”.
A Panglossian view of the evidence might suggest that things are, if not good, better than the rest of the state of Canadian industries as a whole and slowly improving over time.
These initiatives, and the “Women on Boards” one in particular, hint at what a lot of women who work in these areas already know, as I have learned over the years from casual conversations: the telecom, media and internet industries are notoriously tough ones for women to succeed in, and rise through the ranks to upper-level positions of decision-making authority on Boards of Directors or Executive Management teams.
In order to take this beyond casual observations, however, I decided to examine the issue in more detail in preparation for my talk.
With the help of one of my star research assistants on the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, Lianrui Jia, we examined the number of women in Board of Director and Executive Management positions at the “big 10 media companies” in Canada: Bell, Shaw, Rogers, Quebecor, CBC, Postmedia, Cogeco, Telus, Astral and Torstar. What did we find?
In a nutshell, we found that the raison d’etre for CWC is well-founded. Of the 286 Board of Director and Executive Management positions at the big 10 media companies, just less than a quarter (22 percent) are filled by women. The results are summarized in Table 1, below.
|
Number of Women on Board of Directors (Total number of Directors) |
Number of Women on Executive Team |
Total # of Women on BoD & Exec Team (%) | |
| BCE Grand Total* | 7 (38) | 9 (36) | 16 / 74 (21.6%) |
| BCE | 2 (14) | 2 (12) | 4 / 26 (15%) |
| Bell Aliant | 3 (10) | 2 (7) | 5 / 17 (29%) |
| Bell Media | 2 (14) | 5 (17) | 7 / 31 (23%) |
| Shaw | 2 (16) | 2 (18) | 4 / 34 (12%) |
| Rogers | 4 (18) | 3 (12) | 7 / 30 (23%) |
| QMI | 3 (8) | 4 (14) | 7 / 22 (32%) |
| CBC | 3 (11) | 4 (8) | 7 / 19 (37%) |
| PostMedia | 1 (9) | 1 (7) | 2 / 16 (13%) |
| Cogeco | 2 (8) | 1 (9) | 3 / 17 (18%) |
| Telus | 1 (13) | 1 (8) | 2 / 21 (11%) |
| Astral | 3 (15) | 1 (14) | 4 / 29 (14%) |
| Torstar | 4 (13) | 4 (11) | 8 / 24 (33%) |
| Total | 30 (149) (20%) | 32 (137) (23%) | 62 / 286 (22%) |
| * Note: Total only includes figures from each of BCE’s subsidiaries, not “grand total” for BCE. | |||
A fuller table with a finer breakdown by company and the names of women in Board of Director and Executive Management positions at the big 10 media companies can be found here.
A Panglossian view of the evidence might suggest that things are, if not good, better than the rest of the state of Canadian industries as a whole and slowly improving over time.
Thus, according to research by the women in business advocacy group, Catalyst, the average number of women on Board of Directors at Canadian companies in general is 14.5 percent. By that measure, things look pretty good at the big 10 telecom, media and internet companies. These entities look good as well relative to the 41 percent of companies listed on the S&P/TSX that have no women directors at all.
Finally, there are three entities on the list of media enterprises above that stand out as doing quite well, by both Canadian and, as we shall see shortly, global standards: CBC (37 percent of Directors and Executive Management team are women), Torstar (33 percent) and Quebecor (32 percent).
Yet, to continue with such a rose-tinted view would vastly under-state the significance of the problem at hand. For one, the rate of increase of women in director and executive positions, as Catalyst and others show, has been painfully slow.
At Carleton University, 58 percent of all currently enrolled undergraduate students are women, whereas women are on average only 22 percent of media Boards of Directors or executive management.
More importantly, conditions within the upper-ranks of the Canadian media stack up poorly globally. As a recent study by the International Women’s Media Foundation (2011), Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media found, there is no shortage of women in the media industries in Canada; just at the top and in key positions where their decisions could determine policies, the allocation of resources, strategy and so forth.
As the Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media observes, women are well represented at “important administrative level of executive editors, bureau chiefs and news directors”, accounting for about 55.1 percent of such positions.
They also make up about half of mid-management level positions, (54 percent of producers, directors and writers), and occupy roughly six-out-of-ten sales, finance and administration (61.7 percent) positions. When it comes to production and design (eg photographers, scene designers) and studio production (e.g., sound and lighting), however, women account for only 23.6 percent and 13.1 percent of positions, respectively.
The IWMF reported that ”Glass ceilings were especially noticeable in Canada, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the United States.”
Pointedly, however, the Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media states: ”Glass ceilings were especially noticeable in Canada, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the United States.” In short, it is not that women are frozen out of the media industries in Canada, just vastly under-represented in positions of real power and authority.
Comparatively speaking, the fact that women in Canada make up just 20 percent and 23 percent of Board of Director and Executive Management positions, respectively, fares well with a global average that is dragged down greatly by conditions in Asia and Africa.
Compared to the United States, however, the situation in Canada is slightly less well-off. Roughly the same number of women are in upper-level management positions in both countries (23 percent). However, there is a significant difference when it comes to women in the boardroom, with roughly a third of directors at US media companies being women, while in Canada the number is 20 percent.
The situation looks worse when we compare the status of women in Canadian media to their counterparts in northern Europe, where women occupy 36 percent and 37 percent, respectively, of Director and Executive Management positions. In Eastern Europe, women account for an even higher 33 percent and 43 percent of governance and top management positions, respectively, according to the IWMF.
There's a ton of reasons why we should care about this state of affairs. For one, there’s the principled question of fairness.
Second, there’s a huge gap in income even for those women who do make it to the top compared to men.
Third, there’s a substantial body of literature that suggests that companies with greater representation of women on their board generally do better (see here and here).
Fourth, and from a more specifically political economy of media perspective, while there is a great deal of focus in the literature on questions of representation in media texts, there is very little research on who is and is not making decisions that structure media companies, markets, work and texts to begin with. This is a huge oversight and needs to be filled.
Looking at the media, it is not just the day-to-day operations of media enterprises and the content they produce (operational control), but rather who allocates resources, makes decisions and sets corporate policies that frame everything else to begin with. The latter is known as allocational control and it is a form of structural power.
As this small exercise prompted by my talk with the Canadian Women in Communication two weeks ago suggests, when it comes to this latter kind of power, Canadian women in communication have a long way to go.
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