Jay Rosen has a fascinating post on the recent Unity Convention of minority journalists, which had a record turn-out of over seven thousand: “The Crowd’s Reaction Made Some Unity Delegates Uncomfortable.” A high degree of “group think” was apparently in evidence (as it is almost everywhere), but his last example caught me up short:
Group think in journalism education takes no notice of the fact that in most J-schools–including NYU–women are 70 to 80 of the class. Courses are routinely taught with one man or none. That’s pretty unrepresentative. Is it a problem? No, not a problem. When the newsroom is unrepresentative– that’s a problem.
If I’m not mistaken, the stats on law and medical schools are not wildly dissimilar. Get ready. This is a social change much more far reaching than anything to do with skin color.
I dunno, Roger. This was true in Computer Science for a good while, but I still seem to be surrounded by male geeks; when I teach at Colorado, the CS classes are back to being 9-1 or worse.
Makes one wonder where the baby geeks come from.
Hi Charlie,
A friend of mine, Chomsky leftist, extremely bright mathematician/programmer in Silicon Valley (top 100 in his generation in the US in ability, I would judge), tells me that he hasn’t met any good women programmers. So non-PC, eh. I’m sure Syl will weigh in here, as she seems to be the real thing, but top women engineers are scarce. Physics used to be even worse, but that has changed. Mathematics has always had a sprinkling, with Emmy Noether probably the most respected. It will be interesting to see how things work out; maybe the nature vs. nurture thing will get some new data to work on.
Schools in general reward different behaviors than the competitive world does. Women often find that after having played by the stated rules and beating the boys on all fronts that their movement forward in competitive employment is not equivalent.
The easiest accusation is bias, and that does play its part. But the deeper problem is the disconnect between school-success behavior and life-success behavior. Men who have played by the academic rules find much the same situation upon graduation, though perhaps not so intensely.
I think a lot of feminist fury comes from this disconnect. It’s as if you were told that learning tennis were the key to success, but when you entered the Olympics they set you down on a squash court. Not dissimilar, but not the same.
Liberal fury comes from a similar problem. It really torques off sociology and English majors who know themselves to be “better educated” to find that insurance salesmen wearing gold chains are paid lots better than they are. It reveals to them how stupid the values of society are, because, well, it doesn’t value them so much.
Because schools favor what is traditionally “girl behavior” over “boy behavior” — schools are an institution designed by women for girls — more boys buy out of the system more quickly, immersing themselves in something else, such as computers, cars, or sports. By getting a worse education, they may be getting a better one. It is an amazingly unfair bit of bait-and-switch for the girls. These journalism majors are going to be entering the dying parts of the news industry (and hasten its death, says I), to be surpassed by the alternative media, which is currently mostly male.
Those women who got on the internet bandwagon early might show to be the smartest of the lot. They were able to question the direction they were being steered and go do something else instead. This is notable because I believe females are still steered by society more than males are. They are steered in different directions than in the 1950′s, but modern Girl Power campaigns are just as socially pressuring.
I say this as a 1970′s Theater major.
You know, there’s lots of things I don’t understand, but this is right up there near the top of the list. My ex-wife had a double degree, Math/CS, and nearly a third degree in Physics (from William&Mary, not a poor school). She survived the pressures through college, but by the time I was in grad school, she was insisting she’d forgotten all that stuff and asking me to help her with the technical things.
Since the fact that she was “as smart as I was” was a major initial attraction, I don’t think I was contributing.
She was moving up in management, and eventually moved over to marketing. Oddly, physical attractiveness seems to factor into this; a good looking person, male or female, tends to move over into the Marketing stuff.
I don’t quite know what to make of any of this.
Over a period of a century or two this problem will fix itself.
The women wo prefer work to reproduction will become a smaller part of the population over time.
This is self correcting if we can wait long enough.
The only trouble with this argument is that most J-school graduates can’t get jobs at newspapers. There are far more grads every year than open slots, most of which now occur through attrition. They wind up going to graduate school, writing copy for Seed & Feed magazine or Plastics World, serving as executive secretaries or waiting tables.
Newspapers have their pick of the litter. If they want a balanced newsroom, they can easily find it among the plethora of out-of-work J-school grads.
When my wife and I went to medical school in the early seventies, she was one of only five women in our (very good west coast) medical school.
The latest class in our school graduated barely over half men, I am told.
In my view, these changes are positve, especially in medicine. But it is very hard to be a doctor and also a mother.
Somehow Nina and I produced four (male) children, all of whom became engineers! And the boys tell us that in engineering the women are very thin on the ground, as Mark Steyn might say.
Jamie Irons
This is going to have the effect of weakening credentialism in business.
That will leave government.
Cool. AVI is also from W&M. And their physics was very good at the time.
When I was a computer science student at Texas A&M in the late 80′s, there were very very few female students in the field. When I went back for some graduate work the mix looked to be at least 60% female.
However, now that I’m back out in the workforce, I’m noticing two things:
1) Women with CS degrees tend to have “weak” degrees — that is, their electives tend to be the less hard-core topics like compiler design, real-time system, undergrad thesis etc, and more on the trendy side (networking, software engineering (aka software management) etc.
2) Possibly because of this, they rarely apply for the programming jobs — they are more interested in the customer support, documentation, and marketing side of things. And we see far fewer female CS graduates applying for any type of job than we do male graduates, which tells me that many of the female CS grads simply go to work in another field altogether.
I’m not sure why more women don’t take the hard core classes in college; could be the thought of pulling 48-hour sessions in the computer lab turns them off, or maybe they’re more worried about their grades than what they’re learning.
I happened to catch Colin Powell’s star turn at that event on C-Span the other morning, and he wowed ‘em. When he addressed PBS biggie Gwen Ifil as “girl” and told her she was being “uppity,” it brought down the house. Powell’s boss, of course, was toast.
Unity for me, but not for thee
I completely agree with the sentiments of fresh air above. Actually, he or she hits it right on the head. As fewer and fewer print jobs in journalism open up, the ones that get taken are by the most aggressively “with the program.”
which is to say: those that can most aggressively manipulate the self-selecting feedback loop to their own advantage.
I say this as a reporter at a good-sized NYC paper.
Now If anyone ever proposed intellectual diversity of thought…..wait, I won’t go there. I need to work, you know.
I don’t have a problem with journalists letting their politics show–it helps me decide if they are being objective in what they are reporting and analyze it accordingly. What is so outrageous is that these same journalists who gave Kerry a standing ovation will deny vehemently that their objectivity is compromised and think that their views don’t influence what and how they report.
Its one thing to be “neutral”, it is another to be “objective”. Contrary to popular opinion, you can be fair and balanced (objective) and not be neutral.
ìThis is going to have the effect of weakening credentialism in business.î
What planet do you live on? I regret to inform you that this is incorrect. Credentialism is alive and thriving due to affirmative action ìguidelines.î A company must be careful not to promote a white guy with only a high school degree over a minority possessing a more advanced degree. The former individualís ability to do the job much better is little defense in a court of law. Did somebody tell you that life is fair? If so, they flat out lied to you.
Well, I finally had the time to follow that link. I would post a thorough and detailed objection to the events of that meeting, but I have a better idea. Instead, I will simply chant “Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair,” over and over, just the way good liberals chant “Nixon and Karl Rove” to avoid actually thinking about their situation…
Ahh… that feels rather cleansing, actually…
Women are arriving in journalism in the numbers they are just in time to rearrange the deck chairs. The older readers are dying or are repulsed by the systemic left wing bias found everywhere, even in the local newspapers. Studies have found these staffs are even more liberal than the big city papers most people figured out years ago. The death throes began about 30 years ago when newspapers began to adopt the grievance industry’s agenda. News more and more was forced through the PC blender to conform somebody’s idea of an ideal world. Journalists got the drift and no longer wrote stories that departed from the agenda. Now staffs are self selecting. When a newspaperman describes himself as a “moderate,” that only means in comparison to the people he works with. The rest would fit in very nicely with the delegates at the last Democratic national convention.
I work as an automotive journalist even though my degree is in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara. Go figure. And what’s interesting about my peculiar end of the journalistic world is that virtually no one writing for the “major” automotive magazines has a journalism degree.
At Car and Driver (among the publications for which I write) the Editor in Chief has an engineering degree from MIT and there are at least two more engineers on staff. In fact it’s a lot easier to get a job at Car and Driver if you’re an engineer than if you’re the holder of a journalism degree. At Hot Rod Magazine (I write for it as well) it’s much better to know your junkyards than it is to know how to punctuate, spell or follow the inverted pyramid.
I don’t know about other industries, but my suspicion is that those of us who write for a living do best when we write about what we know and care about. It’s more important for a travel writer to know how airlines and hotels work than advanced interviewing techniques. And if I’m reading about computers I’d rather the writer not be making dumb mistakes of fact in his piece than he write with dash, flourish and elan (I should rename my cats Dash, Flourish and Elan).
Having said all that, I deal with holders of journalism degrees virtually every day because they populate the public relations departments of virtually every car manufacturer and every major public relations agency. And yes, most of the people in those jobs seem to be, besides being credential J-school grads, women.
All this is purely anecdotal of course, but my gut feeling is that journalism school isn’t turning out journalists but people (and, yes, mostly women) trained to manage corporate interactions with them. Meanwhile the best journalists still wander into the profession rather haphazardly and bring with them the sort of life experience that makes them effective and accurate reporters in their specialties.
More mainstream journalists should have knowledge in another field. I’d rather have a scientist that someone taught the basics of journalismt to than a humanities only person lecturing me about global warming.
Same applies to military affairs, engineering and biology.
John Moore ó Jason over at Countermarch (formerly Iraqnow) has been making that point for a while now, as a journalist and infantry officer, which makes him a pretty rare bird. Well worth the read.
Dammit. I’m giving up on links for the evening.
Countercolumn
That countercolumn is pretty good! He ought to post in PressThink.
John,
Countercolumn is a great blog. Jason has his own view of things and is not easy to pigeon hole. You should go back in his archives, if you haven’t already, and read his postings from the Ramadi area from when he was serving there.
I know something about military affairs, international relations and the law. My little brother is an extremely bright computer engineer (no bias here
). We both find that reading an article in the mainstream press that relates to our respective areas of expertise just turns into a game of “count the errors.” This leads me to conclude that stories covering topics of which I know little are probably filled with a similar number of errors. J-School gradulates know how to journalize, and a few may have a background in English, but they don’t know about STUFF. This leads to reporting that is both vapid and biased, if not biased by the reporter’s own prejudices, then by the prejudices of the last person to explain the topic using only 1 and 2 syllable words
Holdfast, I’ve noticed the same thing with math, computer science, security/military intelligence, and medical stuff. (Hey, when you’re a middle aged dillettant you accumulate a lot of fields.)
What I find more frustrating is when the “journalist” mentioned seems to think merely being wrong is no reason to complain about what he’s written.
Holdfast–
Actually, some of the people I went to J-school with were incredibly bright and interested in all sorts of subjects. They were the exact opposite of naive: savvy, I would put it.
Having said that, the best writers, IMO, stay on a beat and learn it well. General assignment reporters are next to worthless when they get into anything that isn’t self-evident. And it’s damn hard to explain something if you don’t understand it yourself.
If I may put in a technical comment:
No matter how good content of a blog may be, I will not read it if it features light text on a dark background. It drives me crazy. Maybe I am becoming old and decrepit and my eyesight is completely failing, but I prefer nice, old-fashioned black texts on a white screen design. Thus, I read John Moore comments with great interest and attention on Rogerís blog, but I scamper away from Johnís blog itself, which, I am sure is a shame. Same with regard to Countercolumn blog.
Hail Roger, master of user-friendly design!
No, not a problem. When the newsroom is unrepresentative– that’s a problem.
What I’d really like to know is unrepresentative of what? Blacks vs whites? Women vs Men? Democrats vs Republicans? Those who have studied Economics, say, vs those who are clueless about the subject? Demographically as in the number aged 20-30 vs 50-60?
If the newsroom becomes more representative of blacks vs whites, then it cannot guaranty equality of women vs men, and definitely would be biased towards Democrats. Which, if I were cynical, would strike me as a motive. In other words, they’re pretty much all mutually exclusive as far as representation goes.
I would rather a newsroom simply be upfront about where they are, rather than arbitrarily forcing them into some artificial standard of being ‘representative’. They cannot be all things to all people.
And it all smacks of ‘equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity’ which concept, I’m ashamed to say, only joined my consciousness within the past year. (Are all democrats as ignorant as I?) If the j-schools are not practicing discrimination and have more women than men because more women WANT to go to j-school than men it does not follow that the New York Times should hire more women than men, there are many other factors involved. After all not all journalists even attend j-school, so it’s not a closed system of J-School/NYT.
But more than that not all journalists are hired directly out of school anyway so past journalistic experience plays a role in their hiring.
And here’s where we get into what Thomas Sowell calls Potential vs Performance.
Please read it because I can’t do it justice. He writes so succinctly that it’s hard for even a writer to sum him up concisely, and I’m no writer.
And that leads to my personal experience as a programmer and systems analyst which reflects the Potential vs Performance concept. When I officially learned to program, I went to one of those technical/trade schools rather than go back to college to study computer science. My then husband was so incensed at the mere idea I would do such a thing that I figured I could get away with six months easier than a couple of years and anyway I’d already been through 3 1/2 years of college and had no desire to go back. And I trusted myself to do very well so wasn’t concerned about job prospects so trade school was good enough.
This was back in ’82 and I was 38 at the time. I never once felt any discrimination of any type for being female. None at all. I did, however, sense a reluctance during my career to accept me due to my age. But I never felt that held me back in any way. In fact during my first or second interview ever I was told he’d rather hire a woman than a man as a programmer because women tended to code logically and the guys tended to enjoy being clever and convoluted. I thought that was interesting but nothing more.
I wanted to code, loved to code, was damned good at it. My potential for going far in the field was defintiely there. But I didn’t want to manage and go to meetings all day and shuffle papers around. I wanted to code. The projects I managed I also participated in. The one where I only managed and didn’t do any coding I hated. I saw all around me in various jobs I worked at that the manager types tended to be men more than women, but there were plenty of women too. I became a contract programmer (you know, one of those consultants that the company who places them don’t call consultants for tax purposes) because it meant more likelihood that I would actually be able to code.
I loved to debug and rarely needed to invoke a debugger and luckily my work involved designing new systems and writing new programs rather than just maintaining others work. My female boss was brilliant but she didn’t really like to code though she was good at it and preferred managing. My boss at the consulting company had been a good coder but she enjoyed dealing with people more and so got into the position she maintained successfully for years.
But I just wanted to code.
So I never became a manager, and never made the really big bucks. It was my choice. My ‘performance’ went in that direction. And if someone had looked at the companies where I worked and said there was something wrong because there were not enough female managers I could be considered a reason for that problem. Heh.
Of course one of the factors affecting females and employment is children at home. Programming could be brutal about working hours in some companies. It was accepted as part of the culture of working in that field. Many’s the time I worked overnight. But not everywhere. I knew a few women who were good at coding and it was something they could get an income for, and went home at 5pm sharp, no overttime, because of family obligations, or who demanded and got different hours like 6am to 2pm, for example, to leave in time to pick the kids up from school. A management position wouldn’t have fit their needs as well.
So what I’m saying is that if you all have an equal chance at a career, what you do with that career is more often personal choice taking a lot of factors into consideration, let alone how well you actually perform your duties. Demanding an arbitrary equality of outcome is too artificial to have real meaning.
Katherine,
Check out my blog now. I had enough complaints that I switched it around last week.
I had set it up as dark because I find the glare of a white background annoying – in general glare and I dodn’t get along (perhaps related to migraines).
But since I don’t spend a lot of time reading my blog, and most other’s are dark on light, I’m just not going to sweat it.
Syl
The smartest and best DBA I know (and this guy is very, very good) went to Devry for four years. Furthermore, smart people can learn programming on their own anyway.
After having been a hacker and a scientific and systems programmer, I went back to college at UCLA (Math/CS) and found several good courses that helped me, and in those days (72), there were lots of professionals in the classes, because Computer Science had just appeared with serious professors.
Although there are various sex-linked biologically favored behaviors different between men and women, I have never seen any difference with female programmers.
On journalism, I think the basic rule is to assume they don’t know anything. I have heard nonsense in my dilettante areas including infectious diseases, military stuff, nuclear power, radiation, firearms (where they are really bad), computers (although the specialized columnists tend to be good), climatology (they haven’t figured out yet that the scientific community is very confused about global warming), weather, pollution (providing scares about parts per trillion nasty things), almost all environmental issues, alternative power (if you want to sell perpetual motion machines, just hit up reporters, and it would appear that most think that hydrogen is an energy source), risk analysis (they behave like normal humans, not statisticians), medicine, and conservatives.
Not a pretty picture.
In fact, my question is: what do these people spend four years learning? I can’t imagine it takes that much to teach journalism – in fact, I’ll bet you could teach it in trade schools, like air conditioner repair, if you select students who can write.
Syl ó Actually, the number of women in J-School and the media works against minority men in the same markets. There is a strong tendency among television stations, for example, when trying to increase their “diversity” tp pick an ethnic woman rather than a man, because of the management conviction that the white audience will feel less “threatened” by an ethnic female than an ethnic male (see Michael Moore’s enlightened comment on how 9/11 would never have happened if those planes had been full of black male passengers). Look at KTLA here in LA, certainly a city one would expect to have a cosmopolitan sensibility in such things: they’ve been going through female ethnic newsreaders lile Kleenex with never a sign of a new black, hispanic, or Asian male.
Women are nowhere close to constituting “70% to 80%” of law school or medical school classes. I’d estimate the % for law is approaching 50%–and probably >50% in the night schools and second-rate programs– and perhaps approaching 40% in medical schools.
The increase in women’s enrollment in law and med schools is due not only to a perception that law and medicine allow a woman to return to the profession after having children (nb the “mommy track” now offered by many law firms) but also to a perception among ambitious and talented men that law and medicine have become far less attractive than business as career paths.
Though the grind is just as bad, a top law degree holds out far less financial upside than a top-tier MBA. Perhaps more important, the growth in venture capital-backed opportunities for talented young businesspeople opens up many more exciting and interesting career paths than law. Who wants to check citations all day when he can be creating the champions of the new economy?
As for medicine, good doctors are leaving the profession in droves, and many male doctors are starting business careers with startups in medical devices, biotech, venture capital etc. Women are entering in part because it’s so much easier to get admitted to med school than it’s been in the last fifty years.
Thank you, John, your blog looks great.