On the Media: It’s Raining Men. And We’ll Have a Man on the Show to Talk About It.
We posted recently on the piece written by NPR Ombuds(woman) Alicia Shepard, about how few women make it onto NPR’s airwaves. On Saturday, On the Media host Brooke Gladstone took the story one step further, asking, well, why is that? And then, in an acknowledged irony, she asked NYU professor Clay Shirky, the author of the much-debated “Rant About Women” (in which he said that “not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerks”) to come on the show and help answer that question.
Our first reaction to this, of course, was: really, NPR? You couldn’t have at least asked one woman to come on during the 8-minute segment, along with Shirky? (We would have happily volunteered!) But we’ll let that point rest for a moment to acknowledge that Shirky makes good points. The highlights:
Shirky: Women are not being aggressive enough … I think the concern for what other people think about you is one of the sources of paralysis in the workforce for women. One of the big skills that you need [to succeed] is being able to do what you do without caring what other people think.
Gladstone: You have to acknowledge that when women put themselves out there, they’re called ‘bitches,’ they’re not called ‘leaders,’ they’re not called ‘strong;’ they’re called ‘strident’ and ‘a pain in the butt.’
Shirky: It’s true. The reason I think women should get better at behaving like arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerks when the situation calls for it isn’t that it will work as well as it will work for men… it’s that they will get more of the kind of success they imagined than if they don’t do it, even with those [negative labels].
So, where does all of this leave us? Well, towards the end of the program, Shirky notes that the consequence of having so many men on the radio as “experts”—and this goes for television and print as well—is that listeners (and viewers and readers) come to unconsciously associate expertise with a male voice. Shirky makes a relatively radical proposition: we should focus on equalizing the numbers first, at the expense of relying on the voices of more prominent “experts,” because otherwise, we’ll never stop equating expertise with maleness. It’s sort of an affirmative action program for the mainstream media. But an interesting idea. What do y’all think?
