By Col. Bill Connor, USA ret, The Citadel ’90
Chairman of the STARRS Board of Advisors
A recent survey of journalists in America helped expose a hidden truth of the feminization of journalism: Female reporters now make up over two thirds of journalists under 30 and half of those over 30. Another study put female representation at 72% of all journalists.
In researching this subject, I found a survey from 2017 showing women were around two thirds of journalists then. In comparison, in 1970 women made up only around 20% of U.S. reporters.
As Journalism has becoming increasingly feminized, in direct correlation we have seen the changes in reporting from the more objective and fact-based to today’s more “woke” reporting.
Feminization of the profession may best explain what so many decry and its exposure the motivation to fix the problem.
First, men and women are different in ways that drastically effect the framing and reporting of stories. Multiple polls show men are far more likely to be opposed to censorship than women. Men are also far more tolerant of allowing the views of all sides in debates.
One poll, for example, showed men were 3.5 times more tolerant than women for allowing speakers with of even opposing viewpoints to exercise free speech
In a recent Pew Poll, men were found to be far more in favor of free speech than women, even when that speech is an opposing view and provocative. Women generally favor consensus and non-offensiveness over hard truth compared with men.
The divergence between men and women in terms of priority of free speech, inclusivity, and DEI is profound.
The following is from a survey of male and female professors answering questions related to free speech and inclusivity: “71% of men reported that protecting free speech is more important that promoting an inclusive society” while 59% of women favored an inclusive society first.
“56% of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas” while 67% of women said the opposite.
76% of men support intellectually foundational texts above diversity quotas on lists, while 66% of the women put diversity quotas as top priority.
With regards to journalism, women, in general, are found more likely than men to favor taking sides with the perceived oppressed verses objectively reporting both sides.
Though journalism has traditionally leaned to left, even when male dominated, the feminization of journalism has brought the liberal bent to an enormous degree.
In 1970, 35% of reporters identified as Democrats, while 25% identified Republican. By 2013 (when feminization of journalism. was in full swing), only 7% of reporters identified as Republican.
By 2024, the number of Journalists identifying as Republican crashed to 3.4% and continues to sink the entire NPR newsroom was found to have 87 Democrat and zero Republicans.
Veteran editors have lamented the new “woke” newsrooms: when they publish any perceived conservative opinion that could offend, they risk a revolt in majority female newsrooms.
The prime example was when Senator Tom Cotton wrote about the idea of lawfully using U.S. troops to assist law enforcement with the 2020 civil unrest. When published in the New York Times it caused a staff revolt due among “offended” young journalists and the Editor was forced out.
Back in the 1970, females were over 42% of college students. The slight majority of men helped instigate Title 9 legislation. This and other affirmative action pushed women to equality, and, within a decade, women surpassed men in college.
By 2000, women were over 56% of undergrads and 58% of graduate students. Within a few years women were around 60% of college students.
Despite men being in a worse situation by the 2000s than women in 1970, no pressure came to correct the imbalance.
Just as in academia, women have been pushed forward with journalism. Newsrooms came under intense scrutiny, starting decades ago, if parity didn’t exist between men and women.
Journalism has been on the side of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion from the beginning, both in reporting and in Newsrooms. Unfortunately, that commitment to sex equity ended when newsrooms became a majority female.
The journalistic profession shows no concern with the glaring lack of male representation. Seemingly no concerns over the consequences that brings.
Americans have shown in poll after poll they do not trust the media.
Americans believe the media is overwhelmingly biased to the left and woke (minus the few conservative outlets). From a CNN article about a Pew research poll, 77% of Americans believe the media is biased.
Feminized newsrooms generally
Favor inclusivity over free speech when the subject is controversial or involve ideas considered offensive to liberals.
Favor “woke” language to prevent offense to an alleged “oppressed” group, despite the confusion caused to all.
Favor gender ambiguity to prevent any possible offense of the alleged “oppressed.”
The connection between the feminization of journalism and resulting woke reporting is clear.
I don’t advocate a DEI type plan for men in journalism. Just a recognition that the decades of pushing favoring of women has gone too far and needs to stop.
Corinthians 16:13,14 exhorts men to “stand in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all you do be done in love.”
The qualities of manhood need to come back into our newsrooms. Something Journalism and America so desperately need right now.
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Colonel Bill Connor (U.S. Army, ret.) is a distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Bill is a book author who has published numerous defense related articles nationally and internationally. He is now an attorney and law firm owner and the recipient of South Carolina’s highest award, the Order of the Palmetto.
First published on Real Clear Defense
Also read: “The Great Feminization” by Helen Andrews in Compact magazine:
In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.
The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.” Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers’s resignation.
The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.
This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before? . . . (read the article)
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