Below is a transcript of our conversation with Dr. Patty Williamson:
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. We are aware of discrimination, what it entails, and we document it when it's practiced. Historic pushbacks from those accused of it has taken many forms. Looking specifically at disproportionate numbers of women in radio is the research of Dr. Patty Williamson. She is currently director of the Honors Program at CMU. Prior to that, she was part of the faculty and broadcast and Cinematic Arts for 15 years. Working with her colleague Doctor Heather Polinski, they focused on the concept of system justification.
Patty Williamson:
So, with this study, we wanted to look at perhaps why that might be and whether people working in the radio industry, professionals, saw it as a problem and if they didn't see it as a problem, perhaps maybe that points to part of the issue of why there might not be more women in the industry. So, that was really the initial idea behind the study.
DN:
Was this presented as policy or was this presented as just, Yeah, that's the way it is?
PW:
So, one of the things I found when working in the industry and that I've heard from friends who still work in the industry is that there are these sort of unwritten rules in the radio industry when it comes to women in particular working in radio. And this is something that I should mention myself and my colleague Eric Limarenko did a documentary, probably 5-6 years ago, looking at women's roles in the industry. So, we talked to a lot of management folks. We talked to a lot of women working in radio and we heard certain ideas over and over again. So, things like women don't want to work in radio, women's voices. Men don't want to hear women's voices and women don't want to hear women's voices. So, we heard a lot of these, sort of, I don't know, outdated sort of ideas, other things like women are too emotional to work in radio or they're too easily offended or just that women aren't strong leaders. So we heard a lot of these things that certainly I took umbrage with and there are have been over the years a lot of programmers who have talked about rules that they follow, but again, unwritten rules, things like you don't want to have two women on air back-to-back or you don't want to have a morning show with two women. While you often have morning shows with two men in commercial radio. You know, or you don't want to play two female musical artists back-to-back on a radio station.
DN:
This (the) overall idea which just to my ear and (and) is one who has worked in this field for as long as I have sound, completely antiquated, outdated out of touch, but it (it) sounds like it's (it's) a basic idea that they just sort of change a few words and (and) apply it to every single, you know, right down to well, if there's two women working at the station, we can't have them park their cars next to each other in the lot! I mean, it sounds it sounds almost that absurd!
PW:
Yeah, you would think so and I will mention the exception is public radio. Public Radio has a much better representation in terms of gender, race, ethnicity than commercial radio, so we were specifically looking at commercial. I had sort of maybe naively assumed that a lot of those ideas had since passed since I was in the industry, but as we did this research, we did find that sort of the dominant group, quote UN quote, which tends to be white men in radio. Many of them did support some of these ideas about radio and women's roles, specifically in the industry, so it was somewhat shocking, but maybe not all that shocking when you look into it. So, system justification is this idea that people will defend these sorts of unwritten rules. And we did find in the study that overall, again, white men, who tend to be the dominant group in radio, did tend to defend a lot of these ideas by reinforcing them, saying women don't really want to work in radio. We can't find women to fill these positions. And that gets into an idea that would need further study. Is it that you don't hear many women on the radio; therefore, women don't think about going into radio.
DN:
More on the research from doctors, Williamson and Polinski, and more understanding of the idea of system justification. Next time on Central Focus.
