By the beginning of the August, I decided to take one month
off in order to get on my final master years’ research project related to
cultural and creative workers in Nanjing. In this blog post, I will offer you guys some
results of my dissertation in brief.
In the context of cultural and creative industries in China,
TV broadcasting constitutes the largest percentage of the cultural field. Thus,
in order to access the current working conditions and experiences of CCI
workers, journalists, which account for 70% within media industry in China,
might be very worthwhile considering. My
dissertation aimed to offer heterogeneous experiences of female journalists
working in News Centre, Nanjing (Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation) through the
adoption of 80 email surveys and 12 semi-structured interviews. Specifically, apart
from analysing their day-to-day experiences, I hoped to analyse the obstacles
to success facing by female journalists and how the belief in gender equality
is being played out in the newsroom.
According to many scholars such as Margaret Gallagher (1995),
in a global sense, journalism, as a traditionally male dominated occupation is
at present becoming one of few careers with relatively numbers of men and women
in the workforce. However, counting the
numbers is still staying on the surface of the reality, the world of the media
industry is still dominated by males. For instance, according to China’s state-
run news agency “People’s Daily”, posted on March 2012, the media coverage of
political conferences interpreted female journalists only as “attractive women’s
slideshow”: only good-looking female
journalists get chances to post on the official newspaper. Interestingly, a
famous war reporter criticised this tendency, claimed that television is trivialising
news by recruiting female reporters with “cute faces and cut bottoms, and
nothing else in between”. On the basis of my findings, female journalists in
Nanjing both suffered the horizontal and vertical segregation. Apart from the
large percentage of men who stayed in the role of top management in the newsroom,
normally male and female journalists still assigned to hard and soft news
respectively. In addition, during the semi-structured interview, numbers of
female journalists reflected their antipathies about the informal ‘Guanxi’ (social
network) that is created and played out by gentlemen. In this case, the
after-hours culture shared by male journalists posts a big threat to female
journalists’ integration into the newsroom culture. Linking back to the key
features of cultural and creative works such as unrealistic working hours and a
blurred boundary between work and family time, a big proportion of female
journalists vehemently disagree with journalism is a good career for a woman
who wants to get married and give birth to a child.
In the end, I tried to find out the affinity between
post-feminism and journalistic culture in China. Similarly to Western countries
where women have the power to be individualistic, post-feminism in China is
also much focused on power to become “self-made” and consumption as success in
an outcome of individual ability character, and above all self-determination. Instead
of the traditional Confucianism, in urban Nanjing, the free choice and agency
start to play an important part within the modern society. According to majority
of female journalists, as opposed to considering the external structural
barriers, they are more likely to adopt explanation that the failure of career
success is due to their own faults.
