Females in Male-Dominated Fields – Page 7 – education and deconstruction.com

Personal History

The Book of the Week is “Personal History” by Katharine Graham, published in 1997.

The autobiographer was born in June 1917. She grew up in a large, wealthy family, in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Mount Kisco (upstate New York). She attended private schools. At high school dances, “Of course, no boys were allowed so all the girls put on evening dresses and corsages and danced with each other.”

The autobiographer’s father, Eugene Meyer, a business tycoon, purchased the Washington Post in 1932. In 1942, she wed Phil Graham, and took his name. Over the next ten years or so, they had four children (a daughter and three sons) who survived to adulthood. In 1946, her husband was named publisher of the Post. In 1963, she experienced serious personal problems that led to her taking over the paper.

Two of the Post‘s journalists, the infamous Woodward and Bernstein, were the first to seize upon the story of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel (the 1972 campaign headquarters of the Democratic party) by Republican party operatives. Over the next few years, the paper proceeded to reveal the corruption present in the Nixon administration with regard to the president’s reelection and the start of the Vietnam War. The story was extremely complex. The paper was at once courageous and foolish for casting aspersions on the Federal government. For, the Washington Post Company owned television and radio stations, in addition to print publications. These media holdings found themselves the victims of retaliatory action when it came time for the FCC to renew their broadcast licenses.

Lawsuits were launched in connection with the scandals over whether news articles published by the Post, were revealing State secrets that would compromise the national security of the United States. Many people thought the government was simply trying cover up its own embarrassing conduct. As is now evident, the post-Nixon decades saw history repeat itself many times over both in terms of similar scandals and overzealous classification of documents.

There occurred a mid-1970’s debilitating four and a half month strike of the many unions on which the Post had become too dependent through lax management. Before disgruntled workers walked out, some sabotaged the printing presses and thereafter waged a campaign of telephone threats and physical violence on picket-line crossers. Graham got right down in the trenches, moonlighting alongside non-union executives to get the paper out. She also achieved several female “firsts” and provided various examples of how being female subjected her to treatment males would not have experienced.

The Post had its ups and downs through the years. In early 1991, Graham handed down leadership of the Washington Post Company to one of her sons.

Leg the Spread

The Book of the Week is “Leg the Spread” by Cari Lynn, published in 2004. The author interviewed several current and former commodities-futures traders, providing detailed descriptions of their days at the market in Chicago.

Some traders, employees of a broker-dealer, actually stood on the trading floor, yelling and waving paper from the time the market opened at 8am until mid-afternoon. Others traded online. They had good days and bad days.

One female who formerly made a large amount of money on the trading floor before becoming burnt out, had many bad days, both because the job itself was stressful, and because the vast majority of people around her– practically all men– were sexist. In many cases, the way for a female to get ahead besides having super luck, quick math skills and keen intuition about human behavior, was to sleep with one’s (male) boss.

Read the book to get a comprehensive, entertaining picture of the American commodities-futures market in the mid-single-digit 2000’s.

The Woman Who Fell From the Sky

The Book of the Week is “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” by Jennifer Steil, published in 2010. This is the personal account of an American journalist who went to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, to lead a 3-week training program for Yemeni journalists at an English-language newspaper in 2005.

She fell in love with the country. The Yemeni publisher, with whom she had attended high school in the United States, invited her to become the editor of the paper for a year. She took him up on his offer.

However, because she was an American moving to a third-world country in the Middle East, she experienced culture shock. For Ms. Steil, one of the most frustrating aspects of the culture, is that it is mostly Muslim, and therefore, male-dominated.

Although she was required to wear the prescribed head-to-foot clothing, and could not have her name on the newspaper’s masthead with the official title of Editor (reserved only for men), as a foreigner she was considered a special, third categorization of person, and was treated almost as well as the men.

The newspaper, the Yemen Observer, was very liberal in that it employed female journalists. The females’ families were very liberal in allowing their daughters to pursue a career. However, the females were paid a fraction of the males’ wages, were looked down upon and subjected to a host of societal restrictions.

Unlike the men, the women were punctual, did not take smoking breaks, did not chew qat (a mild narcotic chewed like tobaccco that is the national drug and the center of all social life), and submitted their stories by deadline time, even though they had to leave the office earlier than the men, as they were not allowed on the street after sunset.

Ms. Steil had to teach the group not only journalism, but how to form coherent sentences in the English language. In the early going, she spent many, many hours re-writing and editing. She was extremely dedicated in that she worked around the clock, despite the various, serious problems hindering the publishing of the paper.

She quickly realized that disseminating print news whose quality met Western standards was out of the question. The publisher was unwilling to contribute resources to important areas, such as paying the workers competitively, reimbursing journalists for story-gathering related expenses and supplying them with press passes.

Ms. Steil was forced to engage in a power struggle with a male journalist who had been working there before she arrived. Her standing by her principles of journalistic integrity caused friction with the marketing and advertising department. She would not let her staff write “news” stories pushing goods or services, even if it brought more revenue to the paper.

Despite all of the problems, living in Yemen, with its other-worldly, frustrating culture (for an American such as she), was a life-changing experience for her. She was in love with the people, the food, the architecture and many other aspects of the country.

This book is a good primer on Yemeni culture and engagingly recounts one woman’s adventures in living and running a newspaper there.