RTDNA Survey: Slight Uptick For Women of Color As Radio GMs

Highlights

• The percentage of women and people of color in TV newsrooms and in TV news management are at the highest levels ever measured, but while the minority population in the U.S. has risen 12.4 points in the last 28 years, the minority workforce in TV news is up just 7.
• The disparity in representation of people of color in TV management is shrinking.
• The percentage of TV news employees overall and of TV news directors who are women is at an all-time high.
• There are fewer women and people of color in radio this year than last.
• The percentage of people of color in radio is up from its low in 2010, but down from the high 22 years ago and far from on par with the population overall.
• There are twice as many men as women in radio news, and just under half of radio news staffs include at least one woman, but the percentage of women news directors has increased in the past year.

The Radio and Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and Hofstra University just released its annual newsroom survey on newsroom diversity, which covers 2017 and shows slight progress over 2016.

The good news is that women are slowly seeing themselves reflected in a wider variety of broadcast newsroom jobs. The bad news is that people of color are still struggling to reach proportional numbers of representation in newsrooms, reports Niemanlab.org.

RTDNA and Hofstra surveyed 1,683 non-satellite TV stations and a sample of 3,542 radio stations in the fourth quarter of 2017. 1,333 TV stations responded (79.2 percent of those asked), and 415 radio news directors and general managers representing 1,110 radio stations responded.

More women of color are in TV management than ever before — barely. Beating the record of 24.6 percent in 2001, this year 24.8 percent of respondents in local TV news are people of color. That’s up from 17.8 percent in 1990, but it’s not representative of the general U.S. population, which is 38.3 percent non-white.

Women are better represented in TV and radio newsrooms than in previous years. The percentage of women in the local TV news workforce was 44.4 percent in 2017, up 0.4 percent from 2016. But as markets get larger, the percentage of women in the newsroom gets smaller: Women made up 47.2 percent of TV newsroom staffers in markets 101-150, 44 percent in markets 51-100, and 43.1 percent in the top 50 markets.

“The big picture for people of color in local radio news shows an industry going nowhere.”

Radio station leadership in 2017 included fewer people of color, and fewer women, than in 2016.

Less than half of radio news staffs have even a single woman on the team. The percentage of staffs with any women at all dropped nearly four percent between 2016 and 2017. While more women are becoming station general managers and news directors (up 1.2 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively, over 2016), women are twice as likely to be news directors at non-commercial stations than at commercial ones — though “overall their representation decreased at non-commercial stations, too.”

And, overall, the percentage of women working in radio news is slipping: “Women fell from 36.1 percent of the radio news workforce [in 2016] to 34.3 percent” in 2017.

Radio newsrooms are also doing poorly when it comes to racial diversity. People of color made up 11.3 percent of radio newsroom staffs in 2017, down from 11.7 percent in 2016.