Sex Discrimination in Korean Newspapers
Sex Discrimination in Korean Newspapers
(Tracking Number ICA-2-11057)
Sex discrimination is harmful to a news organization’s management and profits,
but also to news content and to the status of women in society.
Sex discrimination is a financial detriment to management because
discrimination contributes to employee unhappiness and turnover, which leads to lower
productivity (Walsh-Childers et al., 1996a). And, newspapers also must shoulder the
cost of training new employees. Invariably, sex discrimination in the newsroom is
reflected in the news content, which has resulted in the loss of women readers at a much
greater rate than men (Mann, 1990; McGrath, 1993). This absence of readers has a
financial effect on newspapers, too. Mass media researchers posit that women
journalists are more likely than male journalists to include news about women and
women’s issues in their stories (Pingree & Hawkins, 1978; Robinson, 1991). Thus,
more women reporters and managers in the newsroom would influence more balanced
coverage of women and women-related issues in the newspaper, attracting more women
readers. Furthermore, sex discrimination in the newsroom may exacerbate the status of
women in a society where women are not fairly or equally represented in news pages as
valued, productive members of society. Consequently, sex discrimination against
women journalists may be a problem to a relatively small number of women who work
for news organizations, but it has a larger impact on how women are regarded in society.
Although the proportion of women journalists rose from about one-fifth of the
profession in 1971 (Johnstone et al., 1976) to more than one third in 2000 (ASNE
Minority Employment Report, 2001),
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men continue to dominate U.S. newsrooms.
Research has shown that many American newspaperwomen felt discriminated against in
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