Just before International Women’s Day, I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at a conference on “Women in Leadership” alongside Guardian journalist Liah Green. Liah – a multimedia journalist who has been at the Guardian for five years and was behind the viral video challenging the ways unwanted advances on women have been normalised – gave a fascinating talk about being a young woman working at a prestigious national paper, but I feel that paraphrasing her words would do her a disservice. Instead, go and check out her work!
Delivering this talk to a room of other young women from my university was extremely daunting if I’m honest, especially since Liah spoke so eloquently about how she had got a job after a Journalism Masters while I am still 20 and finishing my undergraduate degree… but it pushed me to think hard about what I could say that would be at all useful or interesting, and to keep thinking afterwards. I felt eventually that some of this thinking should be typed up into a little meditation on what feminist leadership within media might mean.
My double experience of combining student journalism and local journalism provided me with diverse experiences of groups and of leadership in media: on the one hand, I was leading a 23-person team to produce a weekly paper, and on the other hand, I was fitting into other people’s projects – local newspapers and news websites, and a podcast.
—
In the lead-up to taking over as Editor of the student paper, the power structures at play in these two environments and the way men embedded within them reacted towards me made me think carefully about how I would utilise my authority when the time came. I had an activist background based on horizontal and anarcho-syndicalist organising, and I’d been doing all of this while struggling to get a new sixth form college student newspaper off the ground – so I’d already had a year or so of thinking quite hard and critically about leadership structures.
But the thing that has marked both my own activism and the historic activism which I’m drawn to studying and writing about has been feminism. Feminist organising tactics and structures aim to hit at the root of the intersectional oppressions which are laced through our world’s power structures. And because intersectional feminism intends to upend these implicit yet pervasive hierarchies, I think there is a specific value to considering these tactics when operating in male-dominated fields like journalism – even when the format is a student setting where everyone is technically a peer and, perhaps even more importantly for group dynamics, a volunteer.
Despite this apparent difference in the status and motivations of group participants in student journalism compared to other journalism, my early experience of student journalism at university was marked by a similar uneasy aftertaste to my first ventures into “town” journalism thanks to men in positions of authority. The general landscape in both settings were ones of encouragement – and I owe a special thanks to Paul, the student newspaper editor who welcomed me to his team when I appeared in freshers’ week enthusiastically offering to write whatever was needed. The general encouragement, however, has been at times underscored by a troubling level of passive misogyny in both environments: I’ve been complimented for being “pushy” when I feel like “ambitious” is the more natural, positive term (and the one which our culture happily attaches to precocious young men breaking into an industry). My youth has been referred to far too much, and on particularly awkward early occasions used as the punchline of some sort of joke. Within student journalism, I found that men only a year or so older than me and less experienced in journalism confronted me and my decisions based on these factors, and were happy to forget the experience I did have.
All of this isn’t to show some sort of shockingly bad narrative or claim monopoly over these experiences – in fact, I’m sharing this experience precisely because it’s the sort of thing that is pervasive. Women in competitive fields are put down, infantilised, questioned and doubted, and when you’re a young woman in a position of power I think you’re at a particularly complicated nexus of these treatments. And all of that goes to show how these invisible power structures act upon us in tandem with the formal, visible hierarchies of rank within publishing. Importantly, also, we don’t often feel we’re in a position to challenge – whether that’s because we’re scared of not getting the next commission or because of (in student journalism especially) the risk of being further mocked for being boring or some other such pejorative. I didn’t complain on any of the occasions I felt talked down to or laughed at, and this is the first time I’m bringing it up to anyone outside of my very closest family – and I find myself wondering now why I didn’t engage at the time to address this.
I felt that leadership should be a check against this. Leadership, like steering a vessel, should be about setting a course for a place where respect and equality are a given – and for this to happen, I learnt that you need a sense of community and, above all, strong communication.
Increasingly over my time as Editor, I saw the role as one of group facilitation. To actually start challenging any of the inequalities at play all around us in this society, I think a team needs to have:
- Communication horizontally and, vitally, trust and honesty which foster respect and cooperation.
- Communication vertically along lines of responsibility so there is support from someone with more experience and, at the end of the day, if something fails there is always someone to step in and fix it.
- Communication outside of the group.
I think these three principles apply to group organising in general, but within student journalism specifically they have these benefits:
- Communication horizontally fosters friendship rather than competition which is a really important element of this sort of volunteer work. It also means that group work is of a better quality and more respectful.
- I have ambiguous feelings about “authority” and vertical power structures. I’m all for giving people a lot of freedom so that they feel ownership of their work and step up to being the very best they can not through external pressure but an internal drive… but I think that vertical power structures have a role in making sure everything goes to plan and everything is accountable. If there are people with more responsibility, they are also people whose job it is to be willing to be asked for help and to give support.
- Communication outside of the student media outlet is, of course, absolutely vital. You can’t just be waiting for stories to come to you, and you can’t just be waiting for the same group of loud, confident students to be making noise about things; if you have the scope to make purposeful connections with campaign groups who could give feedback on the university and wider issues, do that.
These, I think, are the activist functions of communication within and without the student media group.
Another absolutely vital form of communication which has political consequences is female friendship and support networks. I was very lucky during my two years in relative “leadership” roles at The Badger to have a strong, ambitious and loyal friend alongside me as Arts Editor of the paper: Bianca. We had many, many challenging conversations about the nature of success, leadership, failure, happiness, healthiness – and pretty much anything else you can think of! Although we’ve both moved onto different projects now, we continue to have these conversations – and I know there is huge value to the empathy and support we can offer each other.
Something Bianca and I have talked about at length is the idea of what success means for women, and, as we try to reach it, how we can deal with imposer syndrome along the way. I don’t think a work environment’s feminist success is the number of women in board-rooms; I think it’s the number of women, non-binary and femme people who feel like they are not forced towards jobs where they are denied financial security, leadership positions and made to feel less worthwhile than their male colleagues. A successful feminist work environment would be equal for those women, non-binary and femme people – but also for people with disabilities, people of colour, etc
Out of all of those big ideas, what actually happened with the Sussex University student newspaper?
Put bluntly, while I was editor I still gave job offers to more men than women – and an overwhelmingly higher number of white people. The saddest things to see were that fewer women applied generally, and that almost none applied for News, and how few people of colour applied overall.
Initial ideas of mine – like asking everyone to share how they felt every meeting, or using our whiteboard to write up the failures and successes of every week and then work on the failures – fell by the wayside.
Instead, the focus may have been less obvious in attempts to diversify content, get out of our own stale frames of mind – and the focus on communication and accountability. The way I’ve written it up now it all sounds like a social experiment, and it really wasn’t – so very much of it was organic, and of course some of it failed, but the parts which were working well were exciting to see nonetheless.
freyamarshallpayne.wordpress.com 