It’s still a man’s word in this nation’s media

In May 1987 I became the first woman in the history of the Canberra press gallery to be the economics writer of an Australian metropolitan daily newspaper. That this was a “first” didn’t occur to me until now, 34 years later, reading the 2021 Women for Media Report: Take the Next Steps by Jenna Price and Blair Williams for the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia.

We thought we were taking the “next steps” back then, in the 1980s. How is it that after a third of a century “next steps” are still necessary for women to get a fair share of the action as reporters of, commentators on, and subjects of the news?