We need more women at the top: Here’s how we must go about it

This week, the New York Times (NYT) named Meredith Kopit Levien, as the new president and chief executive officer (CEO). At age 49, Levien is the youngest CEO in the company’s 169-year history, taking over from Mark Thompson, 62, who served as the company’s CEO from 2012.

Levien, who until her appointment was the chief operations officer, comes in at a time when news media around the world is experiencing financial difficulties worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic.

With Levien’s appointment, this means that two of the world’s largest—and most influential—publishers, the New York Times Company and The Guardian Media Group, are now female led. In January this year, Annette Thomas was named the CEO of the The Guardian Media Group, and in 2015, Katherine Viner was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian.

STRONG VOTE

Like I said in a previous commentary upon the appointment of Annette Thomas as CEO of The Guardian, these appointments are a strong vote of confidence in female media leadership.

Though few and far between, these appointments are what gender and diversity experts would call ‘gains’ which must never go uncelebrated nor unnoticed.

But even as we celebrate the appointment of Levien, who by the way is the second woman to lead NYT as CEO, we must take this opportunity to reflect on why we have such scant female media leadership.

The reasons have been told and retold by many observers before me so I will not dwell as much on the ‘why’, but focus on ‘what’ can be done to have more female leaders, whether on the boards of news media organisations, at the executive level, at editorial leadership or even at the entry level positions.

It would perhaps be a good time to commend the remarkable openness and willingness to change demonstrated by different boards and executive committees evidenced by recent deliberate moves to include more women in media leadership.

DIVERSITY AGENDA

However, if we are to have our own Merediths and Annettes in the next couple of years, four critical things come to mind.

First, I think, newsrooms and news organisations as a whole must prioritise their diversity agendas and goals.

They must go beyond talking and walk the talk. When they talk about having more women in editorial leadership at the executive level and even at the board level, we must see the deliberate efforts.

For instance, in this day and age, we should not have boards and executive committees with anything less than 50 per cent female representation as it was ten years ago.

More importantly, news organisations must not be shy about the milestones they achieve, no matter how small, because these highlights serve as encouragement to younger women joining the trade. Secondly, I think media need to be very serious about succession planning by intentionally placing women in strategic positions and priming them for that eventual pivot to the top.

It might sound radical, but this exactly how AG Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, describes Levien’s career path.

FRIENDLY POLICIES

He noted that Levien was intentionally prepared to take over the CEO position through a ‘deliberate succession planning process’. This succession planning saw Levien rise from head of advertising (2013) to executive vice president to chief revenue officer (2015), to chief operating officer (2017) and now to the chief executive officer (2020).

Third, we must put in place policies that are not only friendly to women in newsrooms and news organisations, but also policies that make it possible for them to have families and successful careers.

It is time to bring down some organidational and institutional structures and effect new policies that allow flexible working hours especially for young working mothers in the media.

We must also put in place policies to ensure equal pay for both men and women in media, not forgetting friendlier maternity (and paternity) leave policies for young women and their partners who are also be in the industry.

Finally, mentorship. Although there have been various efforts by several professional bodies to mainstream mentorship in the profession, we now must institutionalise it.

ACHIEVING EQUALITY

It must go a step further into sponsorship and go beyond older journalists giving pep talk to the younger ones, but actually investing time in their careers and vouching for them all the way to the top.

The journey to achieving equality for women in media will be long and winding, but I will conclude with a befitting adaptation of Abraham Lincoln’s words: “I (We) walk slowly. But I (we) never walk backward.”

The writer is the director of the Innovation Centre at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications. The views expressed in this column are hers; [email protected]