She Always Has Something Important To Say: Amplify Black Women's Voices
My dearest friend matter-of-factly asked, “It’s journalism 101, right?” We had been talking about sources, experts, and interviewees and whether or not women were equally represented in these groups by media in news articles and broadcast reports. I hesitated, because while we see some progress in the number of women journalists at flagship legacy outlets — such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and among the talking heads on cable news networks, especially MSNBC and CNN, as highlighted in a comprehensive 2019 report by Women’s Media Center — fact is the number of women quoted is not even close to where it should be.
In the 2018 New York Times opinion piece, “I’m Not Quoting Enough Women,” columnist David Leonhardt examined, among other themes, how one woman journalist, with help from a MIT researcher, discovered only 25 percent of the voices in her work belonged to women. Leonhardt went on to say that there was a growing push by some journalists, most notably one from The Atlantic, to consciously make sure they were correcting this long-time gender imbalance. Women in some fields, including foreign policy and neuroscience, were collaborating on creating lists of women experts, and the Brookings Institution launched a database of women technology experts.
All of this got me thinking: was I doing enough to make sure I got women’s voices, ideas, and expertise in my work? After all, I consider myself a feminist who supports gender equity initiatives and equal pay demands. I serve on the executive and advisory boards of three non-profits, Iris House, Reach Foundation of Rockland and the Black Public Relations Society of New York (BPRS-NY), which are dominated in leadership and membership by remarkable women. I recently signed onto the GenderAvenger Pledge.
I’m also a seasoned writer/editor, who of late has been a contributor to NBC News.com’s Black vertical, feverishly chronicling how COVID-19 is affecting African Americans, communities of color, and under-covered populations, like the incarcerated and the homeless and the sweeping national unrest in the wake of police killings of Black civilians. An unscientific, cursory review of my latest work shows at the very least a 55-45 (by my hinky math) percentage split in favor of women subjects and experts, but then I went back over some of my earlier work (more specifically, my sports writing) and I was confronted by the reality that very few women were interviewed or quoted.
I could rationalize it by saying I was busy making sure the voices of people of color were front and center, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as Black women over index when it comes to experts in many subject areas. My Black men friends and I admitted a long time ago that in the hierarchy of intelligent life on the planet, Black women were first. Dolphins were second.
It just shows that it’s not enough to hold and extol high-minded ideals. You have to put them into practice each and every day and do the hard labor of doing better every time. My work will always endeavor to amplify women’s voices. As a matter of fact, I may overcompensate. That’s okay; it’s the new journalism 101.
Nick Charles (@nickcharles61) is a journalist and communications executive and serves as a spokesman for the Save Journalism Project.