Media Myth Busting
by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)
The mainstream media continues to grind out traditionalist messages about women, even though the economic recession has created some very untraditional realities for women at work and attitudes about working women are starting to shift. So say Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers. Barnett is Research Director, Community, Families & Work Program, Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She is considered an international expert on women’s issues and has written seven books and many articles on the topic. Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, is the author of “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women” among other books. The two spoke recently at the Women Action Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass.
Consider this new reality: women now outnumber men on the national payroll. This means more women are juggling work and family responsibilities. It also means more families are being supported with less income. After all, these facts haven’t changed: women still do more hours of housework than their husbands and women still earn, on average only .78 cents for every dollar a man earns. Recent findings from the Families and Work Institute2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, however, are encouraging and demonstrate a shift in the traditional reality of working couples. For example, women in dual-earner couples are contributing more to family income. The earnings of women in the workforce have increased from 39 percent in 1997 to 44 percent in 2008.
Some critical attitudes about women’s and men’s work and family roles have changed too. In the most recent survey, both men and women are less likely to agree with the statement that it’s betterfor all involved if “the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children.” And employees are more likely to agree that employed women can be good mothers. Yet despite these shifts in couples’ and company’s perceptions, the media hasn’t moved away from reporting many of its cautionary tales for working women.
There have been no reports to dispel the myths that men don’t like smart women and that women want to leave work once they have children. On the contrary, the presidential election and resulting coverage of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, reminded us that powerful, ambitious women get torn down. Several years ago many of the national newspapers and almost all of the major newsweeklies told women that once they jumped on the mommy track, they would not be able to reenter the workforce. That is certainly not the case today. Some companies are actively recruiting mothers and several well know universities, including Harvard, run programs designed to assist women who are “on-ramping.” But there aren’t many headline stories about that.
Unfortunately, say Barnett and Rivers, the crisis in the newsrooms — shrinking budgets, major newspapers filing bankruptcy, stiff competition from the Internet for ad revenue — is making it more difficult than ever to counter the traditional theories and stereotypes about working women. Therefore, working women cannot rely on the media to guide their career decisions. They need to determine their own realities and use the skills that got them to the top – analytic skills, strong decision-making, intuition and strategic planning to determine what makes sense for their careers, their families and their lives.
