College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Increasing numbers
  

  Greenlee School's David Bulla finds the number of women in newsrooms in India is increasing dramatically.

  
  In a country where only 38 percent of the women are literate, it's not surprising to find the number of women in the professional workplace to be relatively low.
  
  In a recent study, David Bulla, assistant professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, found that while the numbers are still low for women working for Indian media outlets, those are increasing.
  
  Bulla, whose wife, Kalpana Ramgopal, is a former feature writer for an English-language Indian publication, had heard stories from his spouse about the low numbers.
  
  "You only have to go back 30 years and there were only a handful of women in Indian newsrooms," he said. "India is a democracy and women do have civil rights. But this remains a patriarchal society whose men are dominant both economically and socially."
  
  Just 10 years ago, another study indicated that just 12 percent of newsroom employees were women.
  
  But when Bulla and Ramgopal made a trip to India in 2002 and she took Bulla on a visit to her old newsroom, the Greenlee School professor saw a totally different story. The number of women working in Indian newsrooms is between 25 and 50 percent today, with some departments, especially features, reporting more than 75 percent.
  
  "I would go into editorial departments and all I saw were women," he said. "I had always heard and read that women really weren't accepted into the newsroom so I wondered what was going on here."
  
  That question was reinforced when Bulla returned to India in December 2004. He was there when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit.
  
  "We were glued to the TV to see what was happening," he recalled. "We were watching the NDTV (English-language network) and there were nothing but women reporting.
  
  "All this got me thinking and I wanted to ask not only how this happened, but since the women got their foot in the door how are they being accepted in the workplace and what was their probability of advancement."
  
  The result is a paper that Bulla and graduate student Porismita Borah collaborated on. "The Emergence of Women in Indian Newsrooms" was accepted by the United Nations' International Research Foundation for Development World Conference on the Digital Divide, Global Development and the Information Society.
  
  The two presented the paper at a Kansas City women's conference and will submit it to the national conference of the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication.
  
  In his study, Bulla found that the influence of foreign businesses, the impact of Western media messages and the emergence of the Indian women's movement have opened up the media industry to women.
  
  "The increased presence of women in Indian newsrooms can be seen as India's attempt to fully develop its human resources, as well as women seeking self-actualization through their development of their careers in a substantial and powerful profession," he said.
  
  "Young women in India typically get two degrees and they will go work in a career they see as glamorous such as the media."
  
  Bulla's study however indicates that while many Indian women start out in newsrooms, they will soon move on to other professions including public relations, law or Bollywood, India's highly successfully movie industry.
  
  While in India, Bulla and Borah interviewed several women working in India's English-language media outlets. The study indicated that the women still face a glass ceiling that blocks their advancement into upper management.
  
  "Generally the women think they've been treated much better than their earlier counterparts in the 1970s and '80s when the atmosphere was pretty bad," Bulla said.

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