The Status of Women in Journalism and Mass Communication Education Administration: No Longer So Lonely

Abstract

When Dr. Ramona Rush became founding dean of the College of Communication at the University of Kentucky in 1977, she did not have to do anything to convene a meeting of all the female deans of journalism and mass communication programs. She was thought to be the first and only one. Today she would have to schedule at least a large meeting room to convene 31 women who are deans or former deans. Fourteen women are deans of journalism and mass communication units now.1 (See Table 8.1.)The study reported here indicates that actual representation of female administrators and leaders might be higher than the 25% Rush, Oukrop, Berger, and Andsager (chap. 5, this volume) documented as top administrators in the 1999-2000 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication(AEJMC) Directory. I defined administrators more broadly than they did, and some of my data were a year newer. We suspect that the number is somewhere around the 30% secondary administrator category that these authors coded from that directory. At this rate, the proportion of female leaders in journalism and mass communication education fits easily under the Ratio of Recurrent and Reinforced Residuum hypothesis described by Rush et al. Rush’s chapter in this book (chap. 13, this volume) is devoted to the R3 phenomenon, a hypothesis that emanated from a “flooring” effect discovered for women in professional and education journalism in the early 1980s, which resembled the glass ceiling found in other literature.