Document 43: "Plank 16: Media," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 67-69.

p. 67

PLANK 16
MEDIA

The media should employ women in all job categories and especially in policy-making positions. They should adopt and distribute the IWY media guidelines throughout their respective industries. They should make affirmative efforts to expand the portrayal of women to include a variety of roles and to represent accurately the numbers of lifestyles of women in society. Training opportunities should be expanded so that more women can move into all jobs in the communications industries, particularly into technical jobs.

   Appropriate Federal and State agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Department of Justice, and State civil rights commissions should vigorously enforce laws which prohibit employment discrimination against women working in the mass media. These agencies should continue studying the impact of the mass media on sex discrimination and sex-role stereotyping in American society.

   Special consideration should be given to media which are publicly funded or established through acts of Congress. Particularly, public broadcasting should assume a special responsibility to integrate women in employment and programming.

   Women's groups and advocacy groups should continue to develop programs to monitor the mass media and take appropriate action to improve the image and employment of women in the communications industries. They should join the campaign to de-emphasize the exploitation of female bodies and the use of violence against women in the mass media.

Background:

   "The reality of the lives most women lead does not come through
on the screen or in the press."

   So powerful are the nation's mass media that their perceptions of women's roles in American society are often taken as gospel by an image-conscious public, regardless of accuracy or taste.

   On any given day, one can see a film, watch a television program or read a magazine article in which women are exploited as sexual toys or objects of violence. depicted as child-like or neurotic, shown as ignorant and in need of male guidance. Even in what is presumed to be woman's own domain—the home—TV commercials show women being instructed by authoritative-sounding men in how to launder clothes, wax floors or make coffee.

   Although the media's treatment and employment of women have improved in response to organized pressures, the prevailing reality of the lives most women lead does not come through on the screen or in the press. By and large, what women perceive themselves to be and how the public is conditioned to perceive them are two different things.

Women make coffee, not policy   The most telling reason for this disparity is a statistic: though women hold 25 to 35 percent of jobs in the media, only about five percent are in policy-making positions.

   The mass media have historically been male-dominated, particularly in positions of power. Suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony noted in 1900: "As long as newspapers and magazines are controlled by men, every woman upon them must write articles which are reflections of men's ideas. As long as that continues, women's ideas and deepest convictions will never get before the public."

   Women and minorities have traditionally faced financial problems in their attempts to establish power bases within the broadcast industry. During the late 1930's and 1940's when the Federal Communications Commission was distributing broadcast licenses, lack of money kept both these groups from applying for ownership of radio or TV stations.

   Throughout the 1950's, women's roles on television were limited to the zany and incompetent, as in "I Love Lucy," and to the second fiddle homemaker-mother, as in "Father Knows Best."

   The new wave of feminism in the United States sparked a keen interest in the impact of media on the role of women in society. Women's groups monitor television, broadcasting and the press, and special publications report on how women are faring in these media. During the early 1970's, women's organizations staged an 11-hour sit-in at the offices of the male editor of Ladies' Home Journal (winning the right to write and edit one issue of the magazine); picketed newspapers and companies using sexist advertising campaigns; and filed complaints challenging the licenses of TV and radio stations accused of discrimination in hiring of women.

   In 1975, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) released a comprehensive analysis of the poor record in hiring and in the portrayal of women within the public broadcasting system. More recently, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission published a damning report entitled, "Window Dressing on the Set: Women and Minorities in Television."

   The study concluded: "Television drama does not reflect the sexual and racial/ethnic make-up of the United States. White males are overrepresented: female characters are underrepresented; and minority women are nearly invisible."

   The IWY Commission in its 1976 report to President Ford made specific recommendations for improving hiring practices and portrayal of women, incorporating them in 10 Media Guidelines that are reprinted here.

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Pending solutions   President Carter recently sent to Congress a proposal to reorganize the public broadcasting system in the United States. The bill includes anti-discriminatory provisions comparable to Title 6 and Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act and Title 9 of the Education Amendments of 1972. House and Senate Communications subcommittees in March 1978 were considering the President's proposal, together with a report on job discrimination in public broadcasting by a task force composed of representatives from the Justice Department. HEW, FCC and EEOC.

   More sweeping legislative proposals have been developed by the Office of Communication of the united Church of Christ, which call for reforming the Communications Act of 1934. The Office notes that this 44-year-old law no longer is attuned to the problems of the fast-developing broadcasting and telecommunications industries.

Non-traditional jobs   About 20 percent (2400) of the jobs in the broadcast industry are held by technicians, sound experts and other technical specialists. Women occupy only about six percent of these positions. Similarly, in the film industry, women hold about three percent of technical positions. These jobs are generally well paid and union organized, and provide good benefits for employees.

   Many technicians at TV and radio stations have held their positions since the stations were established in the 1940's and 1950's. Although turnover is generally low. many television technicians are reaching retirement age. This should open more opportunities for women. Broadcast technicians are no longer required to fit the stereotype of the tall, strong, husky male since television equipment is lighter and less bulky than film cameras used in the past.

   Jobs in media technical fields provide viable alternatives to the clerical or service positions in the media where women tend to be segregated, receiving low pay and accorded low status.

Top Federal positions   The President appoints most of the top Federal media policymakers. Women serve as commissioners on the FCC and Federal Trade Commission, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, female participation on boards and commissions has been limited to 10 to 15 percent. The same minimal representation is found in figures on women serving on the boards of directors of major corporations that own the commercial media.

   Organizations including the Screen Actors Guild, The National Women's Political Caucus and the National Organization for Women have been working actively for the appointment of more women to Federal agencies that monitor the media.

   Among these agencies are the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the recently reorganized Council on Arts and Huminities; the Office of Telecommunications Policy (being transferred from the White House to the Department of Commerce); and the contract compliance offices of the General Services Administration and the Department of Labor.

   Other agencies that deal with the media are the Office of Education, the National Institute of Education and the National Institutes of Health and Mental Health, all of HEW; the EEOC; Department of Justice; and Civil Rights Commission.

   The State Department will soon select delegates to attend the World Administrative Radio Conference in 1979 in Geneva, Switzerland. Other international agencies dealing with education have targeted women and the mass media as a key issue during the United Nations Decade for women.

Long-range goals   The impact of the American mass media increases with advancements in new technologies. Entire cities are wired for cable television, satellites connect countries and continents, and video tape recorders can be purchased for home and personal use. As these technologies advance, it is important for women to continue to push for full integration at all levels of the privately and publicly owned mass media and to improve the image of women.

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10 Media Guidelines

1. The media should establish as an ultimate goal the employment of women in policymaking positions in proportion to their participation in the labor force. The media should make special efforts to employ women who are knowledgeable about and sensitive to women's changing roles.

2. Women in media should be employed at all job levels—and, in accordance with the law, should be paid equally for work of equal value and be given equal opportunity for training and promotion.

3. The present definition of news should be expanded to include more coverage of women's activities, locally, nationally, and internationally. In addition, general news stories should be reported to show their effect on women. For example, the impact of foreign aid on women in recipient countries is often overlooked, as is the effect of public transportation on women's mobility, safety, and ability to take jobs.

4. The media should make special, sustained efforts to seek out news of women. Women now figure in less than 10 percent of the stories currently defined as news.

5. Placement of news should be decided by subject matter, not by sex. The practice of segregating material thought to be of interest only to women into certain sections of a newspaper or broadcast implies that news of women is not real news. However, it is important to recognize and offset an alarming trend wherein such news, when no longer segregated, is not covered at all. Wherever news of women is placed, it should be treated with the same dignity, scope, and accuracy as is news of men. Women's activities should not be located in the last 30-60 seconds of a broadcast or used as fillers in certain sections or back pages of a newspaper or magazine.

6. Women's bodies should not be used in an exploitive way to add irrelevant sexual interest in any medium. This includes news and feature coverage by both the press and television, movie and movie promotion, "skin" magazines, and advertising messages of all sorts. The public violation of a woman's physical privacy tends to violate the individual integrity of all women.

7. The presentation of personal details when irrelevant to a story—sex, sexual preference, age, marital status, physical appearance, dress, religious or political orientation—should be eliminated for both women and men.

8. It is to be hoped that one day all titles will be unnecessary. But in the meantime, a person's right to determine her (or his) own title should be respected without slurs or innuendoes. If men are called Doctor or Reverend, the same titles should be used for women. And a woman should be able to choose Ms., Miss, or Mrs.

9. Gender designations are a rapidly changing area of language, and a decision to use or not to use a specific word should be subject to periodic review. Terms incorporating gender reference should be avoided. Use firefighter instead of fireman, business executive instead of businessman, letter carrier instead of mailman. In addition women from at least the age of 16, should be called women, not girls. And at no time should a female be referred to as "broad," "chick." or the like.

10. Women's activities and organizations should be treated with the same respect accorded men's activities and organizations. The women's movement should be reported as seriously as any other civil rights movement; it should not be made fun of, ridiculed, or belittled. Just as the terms "black libbers" or "Palestine libbers" are not used, the term "women's libbers" should not be used. Just as jokes at the expense of blacks are no longer made, jokes should not be made at women's expense. The news of women should not be sensationalized. Too often news media have reported conflict among women and ignored unity. Coverage of women's conferences is often limited solely to so called "splits" or fights. These same disputes at conferences attended by men would be considered serious policy debates.

   

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