Vermont’s twice-weekly Covid-19 press conferences have given unprecedented access to news reporters across the state. Rather than trek to the Statehouse in Montpelier, they can phone in no matter where they live or for which news outlet they report.
But data analyzed by VTDigger reveals that, though the conferences are open to more reporters than ever, they remain dominated by men — raising questions about gender equity in Vermont’s media landscape.
The state began holding regular Covid press conferences last March — at first, three times a week, then switching to twice-weekly. Gov. Phil Scott, Health Commissioner Mark Levine and other top state officials are regular participants.
Last November, the governor’s office began circulating spreadsheets listing the names of reporters in attendance, the questions they asked and the amount of time their queries took. The goal was to limit repeat questions and, perhaps, to discourage reporters from consuming too much time.
VTDigger gathered the spreadsheets and collected public information about each reporter to analyze the gender balance of the press conferences. (Full disclosure: Several VTDigger reporters, including this one, have attended the press briefings and were included in the data.)
The results show male reporters significantly outnumbered female reporters and took up more speaking time per person.
Over the 26 press conferences included in the data, 23 women and 47 men attended at least one, meaning that women were outnumbered by a 2-1 margin.
Men were more likely to be regulars at the press conferences, as well. Seven of the 10 reporters who attended most frequently were men. Cumulatively, male reporters also took up far more time during question and answer sessions: 1,500 minutes, compared with 484 for female reporters.
Men also dominated the discussion on a per capita basis, the data found. Male reporters took an average of 3 minutes and 45 seconds to ask questions and receive answers, while female reporters took an average of 3 minutes and 23 seconds, according to timestamps recorded by the governor’s office.
Experts on gender and media say the findings are part of a long pattern of women being excluded by or marginalized in newsrooms. Tracy Everbach, a journalism professor at the University of North Texas, said previous research has shown that fewer than half of reporters in newsrooms throughout the country are women.
“These percentages have not changed much since the ’80s, believe it or not,” she said. “Back in the ’90s when I was working in newsrooms, that’s about what it was.”
Allegations of bias in Vermont political reporting have made headlines recently. In January, 50 prominent Vermonters sent an open letter to local and state news organizations taking issue with the way they have covered women running for office (the letter has since been signed by more than 500 people). The writers noted that the vast majority of Vermont’s political reporters are men.
Natalie Silver, a law student and former spokesperson for Attorney General TJ Donovan, helped write the letter. Of the gender imbalance in political reporting, she said, “It comes down to whether these news organizations are intentionally trying to hire women or not.”
“Of course you should be hiring great reporters,” she said. “But when you’re hiring consistently white men, I think you have to ask yourself if you’re being intentional enough about diversity in your organization.”
Rebecca Kelley, a spokesperson for Scott and an organizer of the Covid press conferences, has also noted the longstanding gender imbalance in political reporting.
In fact, she sees the Covid press conferences as an improvement over the pre-Covid ones, during which attendance “frequently would be zero women.”
“I reflected back on what we used to see, and this is actually progress,” Kelley said. “That’s one of the reasons that we’ve talked about this being a model for press conferences even after Covid.”
Barriers to the top
Even when newsrooms hire women, they are less likely to be assigned to beats like political reporting, which might explain why fewer of them are covering events like gubernatorial press conferences, said Nikki Usher, a professor at the University of Illinois.
“There’s been this longstanding tendency to push women toward sort of soft coverage, like lifestyle, and not necessarily to do breaking news,” said Usher, who has written books about media representation.
But these press conferences are more than just political reporting, she said: “It’s like the most high-profile story that is happening in the world right now.”
“It would make sense to, like, send your ‘best’ reporter; we’re sending a reporter that has a ‘boys’ connection to the governor or whatever it might be,” she said.
Everbach, a former reporter who left the industry, said she and her colleagues used to call it the “golden boys syndrome,” which entails assigning men to cover the most prestigious stories. “We as women could step up more, but a lot of times we step up and our ideas are shot down,” she said.
Men also tend to be the most senior reporters in the newsroom, not only because of the legacy of a male-dominated industry, but because women are more likely to leave, Everbach said.
“When men and women graduate from college, they go into newsrooms in about equal amounts. But after about five years, women start to leave more at a higher rate than men do,” she said.
They leave at higher rates for a number of reasons, including lower pay, lack of career growth and difficulty with journalism’s tough schedule, she said. Some research suggests that female journalists also face higher rates of harassment from readers and sources.
‘Dominate the conversation’
Vermont’s Covid press conferences each last about two hours, with 10 to 20 reporters, sometimes more, waiting in the queue. The governor’s press team has asked reporters to limit themselves to two questions apiece to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.
But the data from the press conferences, though limited, suggests that male reporters are taking up more time, even relative to their already disproportionate representation in the queue.
The data doesn’t show when a question ended and an answer began, making it impossible to say for certain whether men were asking longer questions — or getting longer answers. It could be a combination of the two, since longer or multipart questions tend to require longer responses.
Psychology studies have shown that men tend to speak up more often in settings like classrooms and the workplace, Everbach said. It goes back to elementary school, where teachers call on boys more than girls.
“Boys and men are taught that what they say is important, and girls and women are taught, ‘You don’t want to talk too much because you’re going to be labeled as bossy, or you’re going to be labeled as a loudmouth,’” she said.
Kelley, the governor’s spokesperson, said the difference in the length of questions is “not something she would have guessed,” and said data could be skewed by the handful of male reporters with extremely long Q&A times.
“I think it’s an interesting question of why there would be that disparity,” she said.
Asked whether the governor’s team should intervene to ensure equity in question time, Kelley said her office has “erred toward” reporters policing themselves and taking responsibility for their own actions.
Only once has the governor’s office excluded someone from taking part in the press conferences: In February, Scott’s team told NEK-TV public access show host Steve Merrill that he was no longer welcome, following repeated remarks viewed as racist or intolerant.
“There is a hesitation to having us shut folks down,” she said. “Then there becomes questions of, ‘Are they being shut down because they’re asking a tough question that we don’t want to answer?’ We try to avoid that.”
Women’s perspective
Though Scott’s press team didn’t collect data on who answered questions at the press conference, a VTDigger review of participating officials suggests that they, too, have mostly been men.
In January and February, Scott and Levine were the top officials who made appearances in the conferences’ “run of show,” the portion during which officials provide new data and guidance before reporters pose questions. Human Services Secretary Mike Smith, Education Secretary Dan French and Financial Regulation Commissioner Mike Pieciak also made frequent appearances.
In contrast, during those two months, only three women were listed in the run of show — each with a single appearance: Mental Health Commissioner Sarah Squirrell, Vermont Afterschool director Holly Morehouse and Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore.
Combined with the dearth of female reporters in the queue, the imbalance led some to express concern about whether issues that affect women more heavily have been represented in the state’s Covid coverage.
“These issues really hit harder in ways that we understand because we’re women, and so not having people in those rooms, getting the space to ask these important questions, about how the issues that really are coming down on women as a result,” Usher said.
While it’s difficult to categorize what falls under “women’s issues” during the pandemic, it’s noteworthy that child care came up only three times in questions during the months of data VTDigger analyzed, at a time when many mothers are struggling to care for their kids while holding down jobs.
Jane Lindholm, host of Vermont Public Radio’s “Vermont Edition,” doesn’t often call into the press briefings, but she chronicles them in another way: writing popular Twitter threads that recount each question and answer from reporters and officials.
Early in the pandemic — while staying home with two young children who didn’t have child care — Lindholm noticed that questions about when golf courses were going to be opened “kept coming up.”
“It was like, that is not the question at the top of my mind, but clearly it’s at the top of mind of several of the reporters because we hear about it every press conference,” she said. “And I definitely thought a little bit about a gender dynamic, or more like a non-parent dynamic at that point.”
She said she doesn’t think about the gender balance of Vermont journalists very often — “I’m often just focused on my work and what we’re doing” — but she has observed a lack of diversity in Vermont news coverage.
“We’re not getting the same kinds of stories that we would otherwise get if we had more diversity,” she said. “If people were pitching different kinds of stories, they’d be asking different questions of state lawmakers, and state leaders, and business owners, and they might be doing stories with different kinds of workers and Vermonters.”
VTDigger reporters Lola Duffort and Katie Jicking contributed to this report.
