Placing her hands on top of her head, Helen Donovan, executive editor at The Boston Globe, made a sweeping motion.
At the IWMF’s networking breakfast March 29 at the Globe, a roomful of journalists seemed slightly confused about this action.
Was her head itching? Had a bug flown into her hair?
Far from it. Instead, the gesture was symbolic—she was brushing away the glass after having helped to shatter the figurative glass ceiling.
Donovan is part of a generation of women who made great breakthroughs in gaining access to upper management jobs in journalism, an arena previously – and often still – dominated by men.
The IWMF invited her and five other prominent women journalists to share their perspectives in an informal setting with women journalists in Boston who continue to face gender gaps in the workplace and who are interested in learning how to move forward in their careers.
New forms of journalism, particularly on the Internet, can provide ways for women to make these advances, Donovan said.
“A sense of experimentation has really invigorated everybody,” she said.
But Ellen Goodman noted that blogs can create a virtual “good ‘ol boy” network, especially in political discussions.
“We still have a kind of his and hers news,” said Goodman, a syndicated columnist for the Globe.
To leverage this difference, Carole Simpson called for women and minorities to make up for the ground they’re starting to lose.
“The progress is starting to erode,” said Simpson, a former ABC News anchor who is now leader-in-residence at Emerson College.
She hopes to use her current position to motivate women to “get back into the pipeline” in the media industry.
Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, agreed with the need to engage both journalists and the public.
“The whole future of journalism is about connecting,” she said.
Moving a lot when she was growing up and spending her career in journalism taught Hume to always expect something different, a necessary skill for journalists, she said.
“You have to be dexterous; you have to be nimble; you have to be open-minded.”
Hume encountered such discrimination as being asked by a source when she was reporting for the Detroit Free Press why she was covering business instead of fashion.
“It was a wild frontier,” she said.
Women journalists are positioned to become media leaders, the journalists agreed at the IWMF breakfast, whether it involves forging through this frontier or walking on the broken glass of partially shattered glass ceilings.