ABSTRACT
More than a decade ago, in the early 1980s, Norwegian female journalists working in the daily press and television news were asked in an in-depth examination of their working conditions how they appreciated their jobs and what they thought of working in a male dominated environment. The majority of them said they did not have special problems in their daily contacts with their male colleagues. The expression they most frequently used was: ‘I think I have been accepted as one of the boys’ which implied that they felt they were treated as equals. But obviously, it also meant that they had adjusted to the unwritten rules and expectations of a male environment, ‘the boys’ being the invisible yardstick to which they had to live up (Skard 1989). In the same period, the early 1980s, Dutch female journalists working for daily newspapers were asked in a similar large-scale research project about their experiences and they too reported the need to adjust to the culture of the newsroom which most of them defined as masculine. One of them remembered the initiation she had to go through when she just started her job: ‘My male colleagues were continuously making dirty jokes and covert sexual allusions and waiting to see me react to it. I ignored it basically but that did not satisfy them, so after a while they asked me what I thought of it. And I said, if you have to talk about it that much you are probably not very good at it. This was obviously witty enough because after that I was accepted as “one of the boys”’ (Diekerhof et al. 1985). To mention one other example still from that same period of the early 1980s, German female newspaper journalists also were subjected to an extensive examination of their experience in journalism and they too observed many masculine features in journalism to which they felt they had to adjust in order to be accepted as ‘real’ journalists. The high alcohol intake of German male journalists was mentioned as a particular problem (Neverla and Kanzleiter 1984).
