For the first time ever, Canada’s 2019 English-language federal leaders’ debate featured an all-female line-up of journalist moderators. Notable as well, all three major network television main newscasts feature women anchors. Women have made considerable advancements in the Canadian news media, with the most recent census data showing that 48 per cent of all journalists in Canada are female (Statistics Canada, 2016). Ground-breaking research done in 2011 by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that while women make up nearly half of the employees at news organisations in Canada, they often encounter a “glass ceiling” in senior management (Byerly, 2011). Women, the study determined, tend to plateau in middle-management jobs. Things have changed since 2011, and the heads of news at both CTV and CBC/Radio-Canada are now both women. Moreover, most news organisations’ hiring practices are sensitive to questions of gender equity.
All the journalists and newsroom leaders interviewed for this study had no really substantive equity complaints about their working conditions. Most interviewees discuss their organisations’ sensitivity to efforts to eliminate inequality and promote women, and some of the journalists we interviewed raised concerns about men being more assertive about negotiating higher salaries than their female counterparts. Media unions in Canada also remain concerned about inequalities and continue to push news organisations and media companies, through their collective bargaining and other advocacy, to do more to reduce inequality and make newsrooms more sensitive to the needs of female journalists.
CBC/Radio-Canada offers potentially interesting insight into gender equality in Canada’s news media. Women make up almost half of all employees at CBC/Radio-Canada, according to the public broadcaster’s most recent employment equity report, and the public broadcaster is led by its first female president, Catherine Tait. Women also occupy many of the corporation’s top jobs, including the head of English-language services, news, and radio, and television programming. Yet, data unearthed in 2018 using Canada’s access to information law, in the wake of the gender pay gap scandal at the British Broadcasting Corporation, revealed that male hosts earn almost 9.5 per cent more than their female counterparts (Houpt, 2018). According to a reporter at a major media organisation, there is a need for more work to improve gender equity: “There should be rules”, the reporter told us, adding, “I think all these organisations could do a better job of promoting women”. Despite some progress, there is clearly still room for improvement.
