Disavowal, discrimination and the pushback...
The NUJ’s 60+ Council is holding a lunchtime event on Monday 9 January, 12.30-1.30 with Karen Ross, professor of gender and media in the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, to discuss ageism and sexism in the media.
She will draw on her research work including the testimonies provided by 24 older women media professionals. The participants had worked (and some still work) as journalists, presenters, producers or actors and their experiences included having their contracts summarily terminated or not renewed, being manoeuvred out of front-of-camera roles, seen their career opportunities evaporate when they reached their 40s or even earlier, and been replaced by younger, ‘fresher’ women. However, some participants are fighting back by creating their own media and developing opportunities for other women to thrive.
The session will be chaired by Jenny Sims, NUJ 60+ Council.
Karen Ross is Professor of Gender and Media in the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, UK. Her teaching and research are focused on issues of gender, media and society including aspects of social media and political communication, gender and news and more recently, gender, older age and the media. Her last monograph Gender, Politics and News was published in 2017 (Wiley-Blackwell) and she is currently writing a new book on older women and the media. She is Editor-in-Chief of a major new reference work, the International Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media and Communication (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) and is the UK and European coordinator of the Global Media Monitoring Project (1995- ). She was Lead Researcher on an EU-funded project on Advancing Gender Equality in the Media (2017-2019) and is currently working on several community participatory projects including one on menopause, another on care home life under Covid and a third project working with women entrepreneurs in India. She has an international reputation as a leading scholar in the domain of gender, politics and communication, and gender and media.
