Gender aspects of employment in Russian mass media: impact of socio-political context and information technologies

The article presents the results of a study of employment in the Russian media. Given the global trend of feminization of the media, the issues of professional self-realization, salary and career growth were analyzed through the prism of gender. The research tools included, firstly, a mass questionnaire of media workers holding both creative and administrative positions; secondly, a series of in-depth structured interviews with experts experienced in working as journalists and editors-in-chief; heads of journalistic associations; owners and founders of publications; heads of HR services of media structures; and thirdly, analysis of statistics relating to the editorial corps of editions at the municipal, regional and national levels - in the latter case the data on leading news agencies and Internet resources were analyzed. The study confirmed the trend of feminization, which is based on the socio-political (reducing the influence of the media and, consequently, lower salaries) and technological aspects (spread of information technology, forcing traditional media to compete with social media, saving on staff and reducing the quality of materials). Dissatisfied with the decline in income and in the prestige of the profession men were replaced by women, that was facilitated by a marked increase in the accessibility of journalistic education. The size of salaries depends on decisiveness of the media, on region, and also on the topics that a journalist is engaged in; in general, the willingness of women to work for a lower salary is forced. Precarious employment that is widespread in the industry deprives workers of social protection, while most of them are young women. The article examines the so-called “glass ceilings”: the more influential the media, the less often it is led by a woman. At the same time, only a quarter of the respondents acknowledge the presence of gender discrimination in their industry, and most of them are women. This is partly due to the prevalence among journalists of both sexes of traditional ideas about the distribution of the social roles of men and women in family and in society.