The New Parisienne by Lindsey Tramuta

Author:Lindsey Tramuta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

Making Voices Heard

In 2018, women represented only 15.3% of the 1,000 most talked or written about personalities of the year.

Where are all the female sources and voices in media? Evidently, muscling their way, ever so slowly, through the old boys’ club that still controls who is heard, when, for how long, and in what circumstance. In 2018, women represented only 15.3 percent of the one thousand most talked and/or written about personalities of the year in the French press, the second-lowest rate in six years (down from 16.9 percent in 2017, not a figure to get excited about either, let’s be honest).65 Only about 19 percent of experts interviewed by the media are women,66 and in response, women have been expected to believe the go-to defense that there is simply a dearth of women experts to solicit. Whether malicious or simply lazy, it’s an unacceptable, unethical journalistic practice. So two women launched Les Expertes, the first free online database for French and Francophone experts across professional sectors. Looking to interview an illustrator? An expert in gender studies or biotechnology? There’s a place to find her.

But it’s going to take a lot more than a database. It requires diversifying the student bodies in journalism and art schools as well as the editorial and managerial staff at news and media networks; it requires emphasizing the primacy of making space for a multitude of voices; it requires men giving up their seat or speaking up when they see that women haven’t been included. Because what does this invisibility do over time? Teach the lesson that women’s voices and opinions are less valuable. That they, as people in the world, are less valuable.

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