Survey: news industry a dangerous place for women to work

On Behalf of | Dec 22, 2013 | Employment Law

Each individual that reads our Milwaukee Employment Law Blog is likely exposed to some form of news media on a daily basis, whether it is on television, in print, over the radio or through the Internet. Although the news is a big part of our lives, a recent survey showed that for the majority of women journalists, bringing us that information isn’t an easy job.

The hard part of this job doesn’t just involve going into the heart of dangerous locales. Workplaces in the United States can prove to be a hostile environment, found researchers with the International News Safety Institute and the International Women’s Media Foundation.

According to this report, made public on Monday, Dec. 2, approximately 64 percent of female journalists that work in a variety of countries said that they had suffered “intimidation, threats or abuse” of some kind in the workplace. When asked solely about instances of sexual harassment directly related to their job, 46.12 percent of female journalists said that they had been a victim of harassment at least once.

The results of this study came from the analysis of the testimony of 875 women that worked as journalists, editors, producers or in other positions throughout various news media. The director of the INSI, Hannah Storm said that a large part of the problem is that “the violence and harassment they face goes widely unreported and therefore unpunished.”

Sexual harassment in the workplace can come in many forms, from a supervisor subjecting an employee — male or female — to unwanted, sexually-driven statements or actions to conditioning an employment action on the basis of a sexual demand.

Source: The Huffington Post, “Women Journalists Face Rampant Workplace Abuse, Sexual Harassment: Study,” Catherine Taibi, Dec. 2, 2013

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