Open Letter to the New York Times
Dear New York Times,
Where are the women? The journalism profession has been overwhelmingly dominated by men as long as it has existed. As the second biggest newspaper in the country with almost 10 million readers (not to mention the endless quoting and partial reprinting in other publications), it is time for you to take action. How is it that 69 percent of the articles that you publish are written by men? How is it that women make up two thirds of journalism graduates but men make up two thirds of newsrooms? Women in journalism go to the same schools as men, get the same grades, but have to yell twice as loud just to be heard. Not only that, but the stories that women do end up getting published are more likely to be health and lifestyle, whereas their male counterparts are more likely to get articles published on crime, justice, and world politics.
Women’s opinions matter. Out of your thirteen regular op-ed columnists, only two are women. Women make up 52 percent of New York City and 48.6 percent of its workforce, and your paper doesn’t reflect that. To expand your readership to the next generation, you need to pay more attention to your internal structure. The readership of the future will want to hear stories from diverse groups. Women’s perspectives and stories need to be told and women need to tell them.
Diversity of thought is necessary for articles to resonate. Take, for instance, your Frugal Traveler column. He travels the world on a tight budget, often suggesting staying in hostels and walking around cities at night. This column, however, is irrelevant to half of the population because it is written without the fear of sexual violence or kidnapping. He has written about China alone 52 times, the country with the highest rate of human trafficking. And no offense to the author, but it simply is not possible for a man to truly look through the lens of a woman’s life. As your very own columnist, Charles M. Blow, says, “a personally lived experience is a far cry from a passively learned experience.” Even if a man knew every woman’s story, it would still not be the same thing as a woman telling her own story.
As a newspaper, I assume you want to publish powerful pieces. Empathetic people will write those emotion-inducing stories and, as has been proven by multiple studies, women are more empathetic. Whether that is nature or nurture can be debated, but it yields the same result: women care more about other people. In a world where human rights issues are becoming more and more abundant, don’t you want people who will care?
A woman has to be the best of the best to be hired over some mediocre man. You can’t tell me that the two-thirds of men on your workforce are all high performing go-getters. Of course you have to be good to work at the New York Times, but why is it that a woman has to be great? In a study done by McKinsey&Company, gender balanced companies were shown to perform 15 percent better financially. You should be actively trying to change your corporate dynamic for the good of your company. You need to make sure your staff understands their own biases when hiring. Take, for instance, a recent Yale study that showed a significant bias in hiring. When professors were given identical resumes, one with the name John and one with the name Jennifer, they most often chose John over Jennifer, as well as offered him a higher starting salary. The results of this study provide one example of why educating hiring managers about their own bias is critical. What many successful businesses also do is hire consultants specifically to find and hire diverse candidates. They search for talent across the country, and sometimes the world, to find a diverse group of great people. You need to stop resting on your laurels, waiting for people to come to you. You need to go out and find the many incredible women that work in journalism and actively recruit them.
If you have to fire some of those mediocre men to make room for those women, so be it.
It’s a matter of your own survival.
Good luck,
DK Rule
Sources
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/downloads/pdf/gender-briefs-report.pdf
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/still-talking-about-it-where-are-the-women/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/opinion/checking-my-male-privilege.html
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters
