Manmade Media? The Muffled Voices of Women

News content is dominated by what men consider to be newsworthy (Melki and Mallat, 2013), marginalising both women’s interests and issues relating to gender equality (Edstrom,2013). Women are stereotyped, rendered invisible, or excluded (e.g. Ponterotto, 2014; Fawcett Society, 2015). Their voice is unheard. The proposed developmental paper will focus on newspaper pages of letters to the editor, with the example of the Financial Times (FT). These letters function as arenas of public discourse which may be claimed as valid reflections of the concerns of contemporary society (Reader et al, 2004). In a BBC (2014) Radio 4 discussion of the dearth of women’s letters in the letters pages of serious newspapers, the comment was made that, “people who write into newspapers also make history”. The FT publishes approximately ten letters per day on topical business and political issues, but the authors of these letters consist overwhelmingly of men. History therefore is being made by men. Research both on letters to the editor concerning specifically business and management issues and on women’s participation generally as newspaper letter writers is generally lacking. Extant research interest in letters to the editor tends to focus on issues such as the anonymity of writers and access by members of certain social classes (e.g. Silva and Lowe, 2014). This subject area links to The Beijing Platform for Action launched in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women when governments agreed to “support research into all aspects of women and the media so as to define areas needing attention and action and review existing media policies with a view to integrating a gender perspective”, a message reaffirmed in the 2015 twenty-year review (UN Women 2015). Research in many countries over the past forty years has found continued discrimination against women working in the news media and that a “hard news/soft news”; “public-sphere and private-sphere”; “’fact’ vs opinion” binary favours male journalists in assigning them to cover serious news stories about business and politics whilst pigeon-holing women as the writers of features and news about cultural events (e.g North 2012; 2016; Ross and Carter 2011). Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of letters published in the FT over the past two years (2015 and 2016), and interviews with a letters page editor and prolific writers of published letters, this study investigates the gendered distribution of subject matter and language. It reveals those subject areas which are of interest to women (as evident from the c2% of women letter writers) and some of the reasons why their participation is low. The FT letters page is thereby taken as a case of an informal cultural arena where men are dominant and women’s voices are marginalised. This is symptomatic of the under-representation of women in national and international business and management discourse, as well as in the fields of finance, politics and economics. This research thus seeks to contribute to the literature and debate on women’s involvement in the media, including their silence, and the ways that they and their concerns are portrayed. What can the informal media arena of the letters page in a serious newspaper learn from more formal media environments where women’s voices are heard?