Hear them roar: women lead all four Unity groups
By Lora Victorio
Unity 99 Convention Online Staff

Move over, beach blanket Barbie. Make room for women who do more than sit on a shelf, who are building bridges to change in the newsroom.

Traditionally, men have dominated the media pundit spectrum and have led the way in newsroom leadership. Not so at Unity '99. This year, the presidents of AAJA, NABJ, NAHJ and NAJA are all women - and proud of it.

Though some may believe that gender does not play a part in media management, the question is: What do women bring to leadership?

"It was unusual that all four presidents are women in the convention this year," said Catalina Camia, Unity '99 president. "We bring an added perspective and a different voice."

Camia, also the AAJA president, is a Washington correspondent for the Dallas Morning News. She is a veteran journalist, with 12 years of experience in the field. She helped found AAJA's Texas chapter and served as its national secretary from 1993-95.

Vanessa Williams, Unity treasurer and NABJ president, is also not a new kid on the block when it comes to journalism. She covers local government and politics for the Washington Post, where she has been a staff writer for three years. Williams also covered government and politics at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Actively involved in NABJ, Williams has also served as secretary and vice president of the organization.

For some cultures, however, it is natural for women to be the leaders in the community. Dawn Thomas, a photographer at WLUK in Greenbay, Wis., is accustomed to matrilineal leadership. She points to an Oneida tribal tradition in which a woman is chief and head of the clan.

"It's natural for a woman to take charge in leadership," Thomas said. "Women are making headway. As people are becoming more and more color-blind, they are becoming gender-blind as well."

So, it is to no surprise that the NAJA president, Kara Briggs, is a woman.

Briggs is this year's Unity secretary, although she served as president last year. She is a metropolitan reporter at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore. She has also worked with young people interested in journalism careers through NAJA's college newspaper project, Native Voice. She played a part in creating NAJA's annual Phoenix and Columbus awards for best and worst media coverage of Native Americans.

Nancy Baca, Unity vice president, is the assistant features editor at the Albuquerque Journal, where she has worked for more than 10 years. She started as an intern and was a minority scholarship recipient. Baca has been on the NAHJ board of directors since 1993.

Still, despite their accomplishments, some find it difficult to accept women as leaders. Others, however, welcome their leadership. Randall Yip, executive news producer at KPTV in Portland, Ore., said: "The numbers may say that there are more men then women [in the newsroom], but just looking at this conference you can see that that is not the case. More women in leadership roles are reflective of this conference."

Donna Allen, founder of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, once said, "There is no way the world's communication problems are going to be solved if women -- 51 percent of the population -- are not included in the solutions, both in the selection of the solutions and in their implementations."

Though the four presidents of the minority organizations may not have planned their trend-setting stance, the International Women's Media Foundation applauds the occurrence. It studied women's roles in the media and researched the role women have in the journalism field. It found that newspapers disproportionately hire more men than women for their executive and managerial positions. Also, in the United States, women make up 37 percent of local television news, but only 14 percent have climbed the rungs to reach news director status.

In other countries, there are even fewer women in the newsroom. The IWMF found that in Bangladesh, there are only four women reporters of 120 million in a country of 120 million. In China, women hold 8 percent of executive positions in the media.

Sherry Rockey, executive director of IWMF, believes that women can "rise to the top" and that the leaders of Unity have helped mark the path for that to happen. "The fact that all the presidents are women is a great testament to these organizations," Rockey said. "They are on the cutting edge."

And being at the "cutting edge" may be the key to gender diversity. "Media organizations are including more and more women. As [women] get up in management, [they'll] have a greater profile in leadership," Baca said.