The industry’s efforts to diversify their C-suites with more women has stalled and is sliding backwards, despite research showing when women are in charge their workplaces are happier and more productive than male-led organizations.
That’s the conclusion of three women who did accomplish the hard rise to the top of the profession in their careers. Speaking at the Key Executives Mega-Conference in Fort Worth, Mi-Ai Parrish, Julia Wallace and PJ Browning joined in a discussion that had its celebratory moments at the same time it lamented that the industry has still not fully tapped the potential of female leadership.
“It’s our contention that women can lead in different ways in difficult times — and these are difficult times,” Parrish said as she began moderating the discussion. A former president and publisher of The Arizona Republic, Kansas City Star and The Idaho Statesman, she is currently the Sue Clark-Johnson Professor in Media Innovation and Leadership at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Media Communication.
Julia Wallace, also a professor at the Cronkite j-school, said studies back up that contention.
“Research after research after research finds that having three or more women involved makes every team better,” she said. “In any given situation, women are more creative, and innovations are more successful. It’s just a fact. There’s a very strong business case to be made that there is ROI attached to having a diversified workplace.”
Wallace, who was the first female editor-in-chief at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said women-led companies appear to be better at meeting overall job satisfaction than those led by men and that several studies indicate women-led companies outperform those led by men.
And yet Wallace also observed that there has been some decline in the number of top women executives at newspapers.
There are a few obvious reasons for the decline, said PJ Browning, president of the newspaper division of Evening Post Publishing in Charleston, South Carolina, and publisher of The Post and Courier.
“Today with consolidation, you definitely are seeing fewer women in leadership roles,” she said. “Guess who run most digital startups? It’s men. You had consolidation, the move to digital — and all of a sudden we are in crisis and you see fewer women in leadership roles.”
Male bias and female style continue to be barriers in some cases, the women agreed.
Wallace, who teaches the business of journalism at ASU, noted a study found that if there are 10 criteria for a job and women meet six they are deemed unqualified, but a man is not considered unqualified until he misses seven of the criteria.
“Women are more likely to be given the broken toys,” she said. “They are more likely to be given problems to be solved than opportunities to be enhanced.”
Browning said The Post and Courier’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on domestic violence in South Carolina, “Till Death Do Us Part,” really came together when Editor Mitch Pugh added women to the reporting team.
“It’s really the diversity of our storytelling that is really going to move us forward in digital as well as print,” Browning said. “If our audiences are falling off, and we’ve limited our sources and our sources all look the same — I don’t think we can expect to reach our audience.”
