2
prioritizes these issues, excludes women from the main arena and thus legitimizes
women’s marginality in Israeli society
3
. Consequently, most chief editors in Israel
(primarily men) have perceived women journalists as lacking the necessary
qualifications to cover security and the military, which are considered the most
prestigious areas in the field. Women covering these areas are very much of a rarity.
The media in Israel, and the print media in particular, have been experiencing a
process of institutional, organizational and professional change in the last few years.
The Israeli mass media scene has expanded considerably over the last two decades
and as in other countries, media ownership in Israel is also becoming increasingly
concentrated
4
. Growing levels of concentration and conglomeration are directly linked
to a range of issues associated with control over journalistic content
5
.
This study focuses on print journalism, which like other occupations in the media,
has gone through significant changes in its gender occupational composition in the
last thirty years. Since the 1970s, around the world, many women have entered this
profession, which was previously virtually male dominated. At the same time sex
segregation has occurred within the profession itself
6
. A similar trend can be clearly
traced in Israeli journalism
7
.
The increasing number of women in Israeli journalism can be partly attributed to the
overall feminization of the work force in the country since the 1970s. During these same
years, Israeli journalism underwent a number of processes described by Limor and
Caspi
8
, which could be analyzed using Reskin and Ross’s feminization theory in the
labor market based on the queueing model
9
. Due to a scarcity of male employees and a
desire to hire women, employment trends in the profession changed. Many factors led to
a scarcity of men in the field: a rapid expansion of the existing media and a significant
growth in new ones, as well as a decline in the prestige of journalism for economic and
Convention