• Other recent work
• Is Your Daughter Safe at Work?
• The Mommy War Machine (responses and blogs)
• The Opt Out Myth (with research links)
• • Resources for work-family reporting
• Burlington Northern v. Sheila White
• Responses to our work

Gender & Justice Project

See below for more information about the Schuster Institute Gender & Justice Project:

• Journalistic mission & scope
• Sampling of our investigative & analytic work to date
• Facts & figures on the news media’s coverage of women & children

Journalistic mission & scope:

The Institute’s Gender & Justice Project takes on this “beat” to examine continuing injustices and biases that are harming women and their children—in the workplace, in family life, in the courts, in healthcare, in public policy, and in the media—and yet are not being fully or accurately reported. Read Gender & Justice Project director E.J. Graff's article "Do Women Count?" in the spring 2008 issue of Brandeis Magazine for more on why this matters.

Sampling of our investigative & analytic work to date:

• "Is Your Daughter Safe at Work?," by E.J. Graff, Institute Senior Researcher, Good Housekeeping, June 2007. EVERY YEAR, THOUSANDS of teenage girls are sexually harassed, even assaulted, at work. Many parents worrry about the threat of sexual predators on the Internet. But teens are far more likely to encounter a predator on the job.
• "The Mommy War Machine," by E.J. Graff, Institute Senior Researcher, Sunday Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007. THE BALLYHOOED MOMMY WARS exist mainly in the minds -- and the marketing machines -- of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom OUnews flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s.
  • Click here for links to blog, radio, and media coverage of this article
• "The Opt-Out Myth," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. MOST MOMS NEED TO WORK to make ends meet. So why do the news media focus relentlessly on the elite few who don’t?
  • Click here for links to blog, radio, and media coverage of this article
• "Striking back," The Boston Globe, September 3, 2006. How will employers and lower courts respond to the Supreme Court’s decision about “retaliation” for filing a sex discrimination claim?
• "Fighting For Fair Treatment," The American Prospect Online, April 27, 2006. Coverage of Supreme Court oral argument on a critical issue: what counts as “retaliation” for firing a sex discrimination claim?
• "The Skinny Pink Paycheck Syndrome," Los Angeles Times, Sunday, Feburary 12, 2006. Why do women still make only 77 cents to a man’s dollar? How can wages be made even?
• "Too Pretty a Picture," Washington Post Outlook section, November 25, 2005. This media critique asked: What does workplace sexual harassment really look like? Answer: Not like North Country.
• "Mothers prosecuted, punished for what they didn't do," USA Today, May 27, 2005. This in-depth investigation looked into the cases of battered women who were convicted and sent to jail—not for anything they themselves had done, but for failing to protect their children from death or serious injury by their abusive partners.
• The Institute’s Founding Director Florence George Graves has explored the intersection of sex, money, and power in such articles as Graves’ extensive 1992-1993 Washington Post reporting on Senator Packwood’s sexual misconduct, which led to Ethics Committee hearings and the senator’s forced resignation; and Graves’ investigation into Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey’s pattern of falsehoods.
• “The Line on Sex,” E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2005.
• "Redefining the 'Private Lives' of Public Officials," Nieman Reports, Spring 2002, Florence George Graves.

Facts & figures on the news media & women

The Institute is taking up this beat because a number of studies show that the news media underrepresent women’s knowledge and opinions, and underreport women’s and children’s issues. For example:

Who is shown in the news?

1.         The 2005 report “Who Makes the News,” by the Global Media Monitoring Project, recorded information about almost 13,000 news stories and 26,000 news sources in 76 countries. Here’s some of what they found:

• Women are dramatically under-represented in the news: only 21% of news subjects—the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about—are female.
• Men are 83 percent of experts, and 86 percent of spokespersons.
• When women do make the news, it is as “stars”—celebrities, princesses—or as “nobodies” – women on the street, neighbors, eyewitnesses.
• Women are more than twice as likely as men to be portrayed as victims.
• Women are more than three times as likely as men to be identified by family status, as wife, daughter, mother, and so on.
• Even on topics like gender-based violence, men get 64 percent of the print space or air time.

2.      Similar statistics have been collected in the U.S. For instance, The Gender Gap: Women Are Still Missing as Sources for Journalists, Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2005:

• Out of 16,800 news stories from 45 different American news outlets—broadcast, print, and web—more than 75 percent of news stories included male sources and only 30 percent included even a single female source.
• Only in lifestyle stories do women show up in more than 50 percent of the stories.

3.      This is true even when women are equally qualified.  Women in Congress received fewer total newspaper articles, fewer mentions in front-page, national, foreign, metro, business and sports articles, fewer issue-based articles, and fewer mentions and quotes in newspaper articles than their male counterparts (Anat Maytal, Media Report to Women, Summer 2005) http://www.mediareporttowomen.com/statistics.htm

Who comments on the news?

• Women were just 14% of the guests on the Sunday morning public affairs television programs in the U. S. from November 2004-July 2005. Women were also less likely to make repeat appearances on these programs, and tended to appear in later segments of the programs. (The White House Project, 2005)
• Bylines in the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines are heavily male.
  • In an analysis of 11 magazines published between October 2003 and May 2005, male-to-female byline ratios ranged from 13-1 at the National Review to 7-1 at Harper’s and The Weekly Standard to 2-1 at the Columbia Journalism Review. (Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 2005)
  • A similar byline study, this one a year long, of the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, found a 3 to1 ratio of male to female bylines. (Ruth Davis Konigsberg, www.womenTK.com, 2006). One-third of those were articles on gender or family or were short stories or memoirs.
• Only 5 of 20 “thought-leader” magazines have ever had a woman as editor-in-chief. Two of those jobs were held by Tina Brown. http://www.motherjones.com/news/exhibit/2006/01/limited_ambitions.html