Who Really Leads? A Qualitative Exploration of Gender Equity in Leadership of Australian Newsrooms

Abstract

While recent research shows that women’s leadership in Australian newsrooms has grown, we have little understanding of how this change may have impacted career opportunities for women, or the newsroom more broadly. We draw from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with editorial leaders in newsrooms across Australia to understand how editorial leaders perceive the impact of women’s leadership on newsrooms. We find that Australian newsrooms have transformed in the last decade, with women dominating editorial leadership and staffing that is more reflective of gender equity. However, the interview data make clear that there are two exceptions—firstly, the executive C-suite of most mainstream news organisations is still dominated by men, and secondly, women’s leadership across reporting topics is still dominated by soft news. We, thus, provide evidence of just how much women’s editorial leadership roles appear to have resolved some of the gendered divisions in Australian newsrooms and the journalism they produce.

1. Introduction

Newsrooms in Australia, and around the world, have traditionally been dominated by male leadership. This over-representation in the newsroom has been shown in the previous literature to impact career opportunities both for women and for diverse and minority voices in the news (Richardson 2022; Romano 2010). Other research has shown that gendered divisions in newsrooms impact the types of stories women are assigned to cover, and their visibility as “experts” in their area of reportage (Carson et al. 2024; Shine 2021). While this issue has been long recognised in research and in industry, change to improve gender diversity in Australian newsrooms has been slow. For example, a large scale survey in Australia almost ten years ago found that while there were more women in newsrooms, they were pigeonholed into less prestigious “soft” news reporting (North 2016).

Academic research has also shown that women are underrepresented in some genres of news and face systemic barriers in engaging with these topics as experts. For example, almost twice as many articles about climate change are authored by men as compared to women (McNolty et al. 2024), and women are also underrepresented in business and finance bylines (Jones and Baeckstrom 2020). Shine (2021) has suggested that women must also work much harder than men to overcome the barriers to visibility as experts in these topics.

Much of the academic literature suggests that the reasons for the gender imbalance in the newsroom are structural (See Shine et al. 2024; Djerf-Pierre and Edström 2020; Romano 2010). With fewer women in key decision-making roles in newsrooms, gendered divisions around the types of stories that women reporters are assigned have persisted over time (North 2013, p. 338). For example, women have often been confined to lifestyle reporting in Australian newsrooms, whereas men covered “serious” news such as politics and foreign affairs (North 2016, p. 369). This situation is also reflected globally with research showing that organisational policy, media representation, and media regulation continue to stifle gender equality for women working in news media (Padovani et al. 2022).

While the existing literature paints a negative picture of gender equality in the newsroom thus far, there is a gap in research assessing whether and how initiatives to improve newsroom culture have led to change over time. Many newsrooms have recognised the lack of gender parity in their newsrooms, and some have instituted policy initiatives to counter the lack of women in leadership or “hard news” reportage. So far, there has not been an assessment of whether these newer initiatives have led to fostering a more inclusive and representative newsroom culture.

The aim of this study is to assess the current characteristics of newsrooms that either have, or have attempted to, institute gender equality initiatives in newsroom editorial leadership. To do this, we draw directly from the perspectives of those who produce the news to understand how newsroom leaders perceive the impact of women’s leadership on newsrooms and news production.

The research questions framing this study were as follows:

• How have Australian news editors taken steps to advance gender equality in the newsrooms they lead?
• How do women newsroom leaders perceive their influence on Australian newsrooms?

This study is drawn from data collected for the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia’s (WLIA) triennial Women in Media Report entitled: An Unfinished Story: Understanding Gender Bias in Australian Newsrooms (Carson et al. 2024), which is the largest contemporary study of women’s representation in Australian news and newsrooms to date. This paper reports on the qualitative aspect of the survey, focusing on ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with editorial leaders in newsrooms across Australia. The three key themes that emerged from the analysis were as follows: (1) the relatively recent dominance of women in leadership roles in the newsroom; (2) the positive impacts of gender equity in the newsroom and (3) the specific areas of underrepresentation of women in key reporting and leadership roles.

We find that the majority of interviewees said that Australian newsrooms had transformed in the last decade, with staffing numbers now more reflective of gender equity and that women dominated positions of editorial leadership. However, the interviews make it clear that there are two exceptions—the executive C-suite of most of the mainstream news organisations is still largely dominated by men, and secondly, women’s leadership across reporting topics is still dominated by soft news. We, thus, argue that while women in editorial leadership roles have had a positive impact on Australian newsrooms, the structural determinants of gendered division in journalism remain in place within media organisations overall.

2. Materials and Methods

This paper reports on the qualitative aspect of a larger mixed methods research project conducted for the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia’s (WLIA) Women in Media Report (Carson et al. 2024). The larger project combined quantitative and qualitative methods. Computational and manual coding were used to analyse the corpus of more than 200,000 Australian news articles from 30 media entities, across 10 broad story subject areas with the use of both large language models and manual coding used to analyse the representation of women in news content.

This paper focuses on interviews with some media leaders that were used to understand gender composition in senior positions in Australian newsrooms. The study comprises a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian news media executives working in full-time positions within mainstream Australian news media organisations. To identify appropriate participants for this study, we first identified the most popular mainstream news organisations in Australia according to the Australian News Index’s (2024) information about audience reach and revenue. We then chose to contact all senior media editorial leaders working in these organisations, using snowball methodology to recruit other interview participants. We started with a small number of emails to identify appropriate news media executives and then asked, or encouraged, individuals to contact others who were directly involved in editorial leadership within the organisation. The sample included a mix of broadcast, print, and online news media executives working across both commercial and public service media organisations. The sample is representative of newsrooms that are large enough to foster gender equality equity policies and initiatives. The sample creates a limitation in the data in that it is not representative of the Australian media industry overall, especially rural, regional, and independent media organisations that did not have enough staff or audience reach to be eligible to comment on gender equality in their newsrooms.

We interviewed editorial or executive leads of Australia’s major media organisations on the record, see

Table 1. Editorial leaders interviewed.

Name	Role	Organisation and Media Type
Gemma Acton	Director of News Operations	Seven West Media (integrated media)
Sophie Black	Editor in Chief	Crikey (independent online)
Fiona Dear	Director of News and Current Affairs	Nine (integrated media)
Kerri Elstub	Director	Nine Digital (integrated online)
Felicity Hetherington	Editor	The Daily Mail (Newspaper and online)
Cosima Marriner	Editor	Australian Financial Review (Newspaper and online)
Justin Stevens	Director of News	ABC (integrated media)
Lenore Taylor	Editor	The Guardian (newspaper and online)
Kerry Warren	Editor	News.com.au (integrated online)

. On the record, the responses were not anonymized as each news executive was uniquely identifiable through the responses and position in their respective organisations and consented to being identified.

The participants interviewed for this project are listed below.

The interviews with news executives were semi-structured, conducted via online streaming, and 45–60 min in duration.

After completing the interviews, we conducted an analysis of the transcripts, hand-coding recurrent themes that were emerging, which then became the key categories through which the analysis was organised. This process was iterative to allow for comparison between the responses from the participants which allowed for subsequent interviews, to be completed after the initial reading of transcripts, or if other relevant information emerged. Recurrent themes were organised and compared and potentially revisited in later interviews (Given and Olson 2003). Consistency was ensured both through discussion and regular comparison of interview data to specific categories.

3. Results

We identified three themes emerging from the interviews with Australian news executives. These themes included the following:

• Women’s dominance in editorial decision making in Australian newsrooms;
• The positive impact of women’s inclusion in editorial decisions on broader organisational policy;
• The underrepresentation of women persists in some parts of news media leadership and news production.

3.1. Women’s Dominance in Editorial Decision Making in Australian Newsrooms

Eight interviewees said that Australian newsrooms had transformed in the last decade, with staffing numbers now more reflective of gender equity—something we also see in the quantitative data from the WLIA report. The report shows that the majority of editorial leadership positions for the major mainstream news organisations are currently occupied by women. Kerry Warren, Editor at News.com.au, confirmed that one of Australia’s largest newsrooms was led almost exclusively by women:

At the moment, my deputy is a woman, the social media editor, the news editor, the homepage editor, the commissioning editor, the sections editor—most of our news desk is female. Below that, the actual reporters are a bit more evenly split, but it is still more women than men.

The report also showed that there was an even split of men and women working as journalists in the newsroom. This was confirmed by interviewees from The Daily Mail, Seven Media, ABC, Australian Financial Review, and Crikey.

Many interviewees said these changes occurred as a result of newsroom hiring that was overtly focused on attracting women. For example, Kerri Elstub, Director of nine.com.au (the digital content arm of Nine Media in Australia) said that the news organisation had not instigated gender equity quotas but instead focused on creating impact through different employment initiatives such as improving the appeal of news internships to women and ensuring flexible work hours for women returning from parental leave. Elstub suggested that these hiring initiatives also meant that traditionally gendered reporting roles such as sports were now more evenly split:

There are definitely more women in the newsroom. There are now three women in our sports team. Probably three years ago, we didn’t have any. That’s happened both through opportunity, the right people putting their hands up, and our fabulous internship program. Our last four interns were all young women.

Elstub’s colleague at Nine, Fiona Dear, Director of News and Current Affairs also suggested the newsroom had changed over a generation of hiring initiatives at Nine:

Twenty years ago, there were men in in all the key seats. They controlled the narrative about what we presented to the audience every night. That has changed. I look out the window here now and I can see there’s a there’s a female EP in the 6 p.m. News tonight. There’s a female EP in the afternoon news.

Almost all of the interviewees suggested that better gender representation was not necessarily the result of gender equity policy or hiring quotas, nor would these types of policy initiatives be pursued in future. Instead, many interviews suggested that change had come as the result of careful work to change newsroom culture to be more inclusive of working mothers and the need for flexibility in the workplace. Most suggested that there was now little need for recruitment policies to ensure gender parity in newsrooms and that traditionally male-dominated reporting roles, such as sports and politics, were increasingly staffed by women. For example, Gemma Acton, Director of News Operations from SevenWest Media, suggested that working within organisational structures (rather than specific policy initiatives) helped to ensure that newsroom culture reflected gender equity principles:

There’s a lot of collaboration between People and Culture and the newsroom… we work very closely with regard to things like making sure job ads are gender neutral, for example… last year we introduced 5 days of fertility treatment leave for anybody who needs that and recognises the psychological and physical challenge that can be for women.

There was only one notable exception to the consensus between interviewees that gender diversity quotas were no longer needed. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had a number of quotas that were aligned to an organisational charter. ABC is obliged to create policy initiatives and track outcomes to ensure that the organisation is meeting organisational targets aligned with the charter. Justin Smith, Director of News, ABC, suggested that diversity targets were a key part of the charter:

A key part of the ABC Charter is reflecting the diversity of Australia and that means diversity in all ways and certainly Gender equality and gender the diversity of people by gender is incredibly important.

ABC sets employment targets as a result of staff consultation and initiatives set out in the charter. As of 30 June 2024, ABC’s policies on diversity had the following outcomes: 21.5 per cent of the total ABC News workforce identified as CALD and 57 per cent of the workforce were women.

Similarly to hiring quotas, our interviews showed that few news organisations were actively pursuing gender equity initiatives to improve gender equity across traditionally male-dominated reporting roles. Three interviewees suggested that news organisations had an awareness of the continued underrepresentation of women in some journalism roles, but this prompted very few outlets to review their practices. One exception was Cosima Marriner, Editor of Australian Financial Review (AFR), who said AFR had instigated several initiatives as part of an organisational project to improve the number of female columnists contributing to the AFR. Similarly, Kerry Warren suggested that News.com.au had begun an initiative to build a contact list of more diverse experts and commentators.

It’s been an ongoing project for 18 months to two years now, of building up a bit of a database of more diverse contacts of women experts and people from different cultural or linguistic backgrounds just to address a bit of that middle-aged white man imbalance. It’s working quite well for us, but it’s definitely something we could focus more on.

Marriner also suggested that the AFR’s initiatives had had limited success. The AFR had partnered with other organisations (including the WLIA) to run seminars for women interested in writing expert commentary. Despite recording excellent attendance at the seminars, the initiative did not result in growth in the number of women columnists at AFR.

Women are really busy. I hate to gender stereotype, but women are not just working important jobs. They’re also looking after kids, managing the mental load of the entire family. It is hard to find the time to do this [opinion writing] when it is not intrinsic to your day-to-day job or your personal life…I think also women are cautious or reluctant because they are worried about a pile on.

Marriner, along with half of the other interviewees, suggested that women’s larger domestic workload, fear of trolling or criticism and lack of confidence had all contributed to the continuing underrepresentation of women in expert and executive leadership roles, despite the positive impact women’s inclusion in editorial decision making had made to newsrooms.

Others suggested that challenges exist in ensuring intersectional equality and ensuring access and safe inclusion for women and disadvantaged or minority groups in the newsroom, with “psychological safety” being a key concern for improving diverse representation in the newsroom, as Kerri Elstub explained. An intersectional approach considers multiple identity categories (gender, class, and race) to consider a person’s experience of privilege or disadvantage within society. Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” to reject the “single axis” frameworks of social identity in favour of multiple dimensions that are mutually constitutive of a person’s sense of self and lived experiences. Recent research has suggested that taking an intersectional approach to understanding the structure of newsrooms and news production would assist not only in understanding some of the causes of inequality in news representation, but also in the experiences of journalists themselves (Peterson-Salahuddin 2021; Mesmer 2022; Banjac 2022). Very few interviewees took an intersectional approach to gender equality in the newsroom overall. Unsurprisingly, this meant that very few of the interviewees linked retention of women and minority groups in newsrooms to their experience of psychological safety in performing journalism work, or in the structure of the news organisation more broadly. Very few reflected on the reasons women might refuse or be “hard to convince” to take on a leadership role in the newsroom or in producing media content, other than through the singular frame of gender. That is, women’s experiences of disadvantage due to race or class were not factored into the interviewee’s responses.

3.2. Women’s Inclusion in Editorial Decision Making Has Impacted Positively on Broader Organisational Policy

The second recurrent theme emerging from the interviews was the positive impact of women’s inclusion in editorial decisions on broader organisational policy. The consistent response from interviewees about their perceptions of the changing newsroom was that newsrooms are now more “flexible” and “family-friendly” and that news production culture was different compared to the newsrooms of the past. For example, Sophie Black, Editor in Chief at Crikey, suggested that the ability to offer hybrid and family-friendly work hours had improved staff retention:

I think the one thing that media companies can offer now is the opportunity to work in some sort of hybrid form so that you’re offering the flexibility around that family timetable. And making sure that it doesn’t prohibit you from a management role in a senior leadership role as well …Offering management roles that are part-time absolutely is a game changer and flexibility around coming into the office.

Black made the observation in the context of comparing this new flexibility to her own previous experience as a new parent:

Certainly, when I was having my first baby, who is 12 now, I made the decision as editor at the time, I didn’t want to have a baby and run a publication at the same time… I made the call because it just didn’t seem possible for the hours that you needed to commit.

Black now works part-time as Editor in Chief of Crikey, which she says was an opportunity to work flexibly that all editorial staff are now afforded.

Other interviewees such as Black suggested that the “uncompromising” nature of the traditional newsroom was shifting in line with modern employer expectations. For example, The Guardian enforced a strict overtime policy, while News.com.au offered mentoring for women journalists, and Seven West had recently introduced five days of fertility treatment leave. Many interviewees said these were positive changes, compared with the working conditions in newsrooms of the past. For example, Kerri Elstub reflected on newsroom culture at the start of her career, compared to the current day:

In the world I grew up in, you always went in. I went to work the day after my hen’s day. I would never have asked for a day off. So, I love that now women put themselves first. They’re hard workers and dedicated, but they also know when it’s time to draw the line which I really admire…I’ve got two mums who have just returned to work, and I’ve got two women pregnant at this stage. And there are a lot of conversations. It’s around the flexibility. And that’s something that you have to offer, you need to offer.

It is clear from the interviews that editorial leadership is aware of the gender inequalities that have impeded women’s inclusion in the newsrooms of the past—and some of the interviewees were themselves subject to those inequalities. It was clear that they had championed, or at least fostered, some of the practices that had led to more family-friendly, flexible and inclusive newsrooms. While interviewees are united in suggesting that newsroom culture in Australia is changing for the better, the “long shadow” of unequal representation across traditionally male-dominated reporting roles, and as experts in news coverage still persists (Carson et al. 2024).

3.3. Women Were Still Underrepresented in Some Parts of News Media Leadership and News Production

The interview responses indicated that while editorial leadership was dominated by women, there were three notable exceptions to women’s dominance of the newsroom. Interviewees said that columns and other expert news commentary roles tended to be occupied by men, as did news production roles such as videography and editing. Despite women dominating leadership of editorial roles, the executive leadership of media organisations—the C-suite—also tended to be dominated by men.

Most of the interviewees suggested that gender equality policy or hiring quotas for the editorial staffing of newsrooms were no longer needed. However, almost all agreed that there remained a need to promote women’s leadership at the executive level of news media organisations, where the majority of leaders were men. Quantitative data from the WLIA report confirms that the executive C-suite of most of the mainstream news organisations represented in this study was still dominated by men, with little to no indication of intersectional representation within the executive team. Other research has also shown more broadly that gender pay gaps exist from the newsroom to the executive suite (Cushion 2007; Iftikhar et al. 2024) and that one of the biggest hurdles to women’s inclusion in the media executive teams is the attitudes of other men in positions of power (Gallagher 2001).

Kerry Warren said that despite the inclusion of women in editorial decision making, it is the “complete opposite” at the next level of leadership:

At that senior executive level, I’m the only woman and certainly the only woman under 40. It’s a big difference. I think the insight that I’ve got having seen that the next level up is that it’s still very old and male dominated.

Others suggested that the careful work to ensure hiring that represented diverse perspectives was at the editorial level, and the executive level had not progressed to these considerations.

For example, Lenore Taylor, Editor of The Guardian reflected on her experience at other organisations:

You aren’t necessarily acknowledged or credited in the same way as male executives are. People still talk over you; it doesn’t matter if you’re the boss.

This is also reflected in research By Gallagher (2001) who suggests that “one of the most important implications of the male dominance within media organizations is that women are judged by male standards and performance criteria. Often this means a constant effort to be taken seriously”. Taylor’s experience of exclusion at the executive level was shared by some of the other interviewees, which caused them to reflect on how to improve newsroom culture. Kerry Warren, for example, had reflected on barriers to entry for women leaders at her level:

There are so many brilliant women doing a phenomenal job every single day in our business and yet that’s not reflected on the next level up. So, it makes me wonder what we need to do as an organisation to break through that barrier a bit.

On the other hand, Taylor reflected on how she hoped her tenure might improve the experience of the next woman in her role:

[I hope] she won’t have the struggles that I had early on with very little support and really having to do many functions myself…I hope I have built a healthy functioning organisation for her.

While others also reflected this view, it was perhaps most pertinent to the experience of Fiona Dear, Director of News and Current Affairs at Nine. Dear had begun her tenure in the midst of scandal at Nine, with an external review of the company finding a culture of widespread bullying and sexual harassment. Dear’s immediate predecessor Darren Wick had left the organisation after allegations of sexual harassment from women working at Nine had emerged publicly (Khadem 2024). Dear said that changing the culture of the newsroom for women was her top priority:

My first priority with this team is to try and get the trust back. A lot of the trust, particularly with women in the newsroom, has been eroded.

More importantly, Dear suggested that cultural change in the newsroom was a way to manage change upward as well.

I want this newsroom to be the poster child for the business. This is how you do it. And let the rest of the business follow our lead. Now we’re going to show you the way of how as a business, as an organisation, this is the way you do it. The rest of the business knows we have got to listen. Now, let’s lead the change.

Dear also recognised the irony of the start of her tenure as one of the first women in the role being spent accounting for the mistakes of her male predecessor:

I was angry that I was given this opportunity and had to clean up someone else’s shit.

This comment and others made by interviewees showed that men had benefitted from the leadership of women in newsrooms. For example, organisations such as Crikey had ensured that men as well as women had access to generous parental leave and options for hybrid work while taking on caring duties. However, most of the actual labour of instigating change had come down to women themselves through mentoring and organising for advocacy. Yet this work was not emulated at the highest reaches of news organisations. The interviewees spoke about men continuing to hire other men to positions of power, and Dear’s experience of scandals involving sexual harassment and toxic bullying cultures had not been addressed by men at the upper echelons of Nine. Similarly, other research has shown that limiting women’s authority and leadership within news organisations extended to the exclusive socialisation of men to hierarchies of power beyond the newsroom (Djerf-Pierre 2007). Gendered hierarchies within media organisations both formalise and socialise the exclusion of women and women’s perspectives from broader organisational decision making. Despite their experiences, several interviewees still put the onus of leading change on women, suggesting change required women to become more confident in their leadership abilities. Leadership mentoring and training to overcome confidence issues were some of the methods for boosting the underrepresentation of women at the executive level.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

There is no doubt that the modern Australian newsroom is increasingly staffed and led by women. The interviews showed that most of the major news media organisations had changed to incorporate women’s leadership. Many interviewees suggested this cultural change in the newsroom had occurred because of gender equality initiatives, such as introducing more family-friendly role structures and hiring initiatives.

It is clear from the interviews conducted that news editors are taking seriously their role in advancing gender equity in the newsroom, and many point to concrete actions taken to remove organisational policy or structure that limits women’s professional inclusion in the newsroom. Many sought to make their newsrooms more family-friendly and to remove obstacles for women in rejoining the newsroom after taking parental leave.

The interviews show that there are more women in newsrooms overall, and more women in leadership positions in an editorial context. However, challenges exist in ensuring intersectional equality by ensuring access and inclusion for minority groups in the newsroom. There are still issues with ensuring that women and minority groups are protected from discriminatory behaviour in the newsroom, and from external abuse and online harassment. Few interviewees could describe specific policies protecting women and minorities from online abuse, and only one organisation, ABC, had invested in resources for research and policy change around journalists’ experiences of online harassment.

Many of the women interviewed described starting their careers in newsrooms when overwork was once an expectation of the job, family commitments were to be hidden, and “men created the narrative” of the day’s news. But most described newsrooms that now had family-friendly policies in place and were committed to ensuring that women at all stages of life did not have to make a choice between work progression and family commitments. This optimism is not necessarily reflected at the global level, where research has shown that gender imbalances in news organisations, and in news media content remain overlooked in most countries, apart from the Nordics and, more recently, the United Kingdom and Germany. Furthermore, issues of diversity as they intersect with gender continue to be an issue globally and in Australia (Padovani et al. 2022).

Though changes in Australian newsrooms had clearly been the result of considering gender equality in newsroom representation, many interviewees suggested that initiatives like hiring quotas were no longer needed. Some implied that tracking change against gender diversity quotas was anathema to the more holistic approach to cultural change that women were often leading in the newsrooms, and this approach contributed to having “a team in place where everybody has got there on merit”. Similarly, other interviewees suggested that the improved culture of the newsroom itself was enough to attract women to journalism; however, it was clear that very few newsroom leads had considered the intersectionality of their newsrooms, nor the psychological safety of vulnerable and minority groups in the newsroom.

One thing yet to change in Australian newsrooms, as acknowledged by the editor interviewees, was the protection of women and minorities from the effects of online work. Many stated no clear policy directive around social media well-being, while also acknowledging the huge impact it had on journalists, particularly women who were disproportionately targeted by online trolls. Strategies ranged from discouraging journalists from social media use to directing journalists to organisationally provided counselling for support.

There was a positive commitment from the executives to “be the conscience” of the newsroom by ensuring equal representation of women as experts and commentators. Only some had backed this commitment with the use of analytics to track the representation of women in the news, or an established editorial strategy. Australian Financial Review, for example, had worked hard both to track and establish longstanding strategies to increase the number of women commentators. But challenges remain. There was no indication from interviewees of men’s role in boosting gender equality in the newsroom; change was seen to be the sole responsibility of women. One interesting comment many interviewees made was the need to boost confidence in women to lead editorial decision making. “Imposter syndrome”, “Women’s guilt”, and questioning whether they were generally “good enough” were consistently forwarded as institutional hurdles to overcome. It was clear that the interviewees perceived the lack of gender equality in news representation and leadership as the responsibility of women themselves to tackle. Any of the structural impediments to women’s leadership were largely ignored by interviewees.

Whether these hurdles were socially or organisationally created, their impact was lasting. News executives lamented the difficulties of “convincing” women of their suitability for leadership roles, of women seeing opportunities to write expert opinions as just more “mental load” and of the need to have more “mentorship” and “boosting” of women to take on editorial roles traditionally dominated by men. Importantly, the interviewees showed determination to change longstanding gender norms, mainly from women leaders who had seen the impact on their career of the everyday misogyny that had marked Australian newsrooms in the past—sometimes the recent past—and the anger and determination that it did not continue into the future.

The interviews revealed a gap between the equal representation of women in mainstream newsrooms and their actual presence across diverse reporting topics. The presence of women in editorial leadership roles appears to have not fully resolved some deeply rooted gendered divisions in various reporting areas revealed in the data—such as foreign affairs, science reporting, and sport. In terms of gender equality in news coverage, news executives had a realistic sense of the gender balance in the news coverage produced by their newsrooms. Most knew there was room for improvement, especially around the representation of women from diverse backgrounds.

The clear issue remaining for gender equality in journalism was the lack of women in the executive C-suite of most mainstream news organisations. It seemed clear that while women were entrusted with the day-to-day editorial direction of newsrooms, leadership of the scope, vision, and financial future of news organisations was left largely to older men. Most news organisations are seen to be lacking diversity within executive leadership and in accountability for the lack of women’s voices in positions of expertise. Indeed, the lack of organisational initiative reinforces the need for newsroom policies and practices to more clearly focus on underrepresentation both in terms of women’s bylines and quoted sources. Women’s perspectives continue to be overshadowed by the dominance of men’s voices and images as representatives of expertise and leadership, with little sense of executive-level accountability for change in the future.

It is also important to acknowledge that the current data collection limitations prevent us from considering and analysing the gendered impacts of cultural diversity and other elements of intersectionality. Similarly, the small sample size and underrepresentation of independent and rural news organisations have created limitations in the analysis. While the need to proactively support all forms of diversity is recognised in various editor interviews, we hope future advancements in data collection will allow for a deeper exploration of how diverse identities are represented in the media in future research reports.