Gender Gaps in the Career Paths of Journalists in Brazil: A Longitudinal Analysis of 2,500 Linkedin CVs

Journalism figures in the social imagination as a profession that enjoys power and prestige. Despite this, the professional category lives in a fickle, insecure scenario, at the mercy of market rules, in which many are not even able to work for a long time in their chosen profession.

At a time like the present, of intense technological transformation, the flexibilization of work (NICOLETTI, 2021) and a crisis of governance in journalism, paradoxically, there is a greater growth of women in the profession: while in 1995 they represented 28% of journalists worldwide, in 2009 this figure increased to 37%, reaching 47% in Europe in 2012 (HANITZSCH; HANUSCH, 2012). In Brazil, in 2021, women made up 57.8% of journalists (LIMA; 2021).

In this research, I seek to understand how gender inequalities impact on the professional trajectories of 2,500 Brazilian journalists over 15 years, by analyzing CVs published on LinkedIn. The data is interpreted in the light of feminist studies that engage with the sociology of professions and theories of journalism, especially the notions of feminization and gender inequalities, which are used as categories of analysis. The methodology, which involves collecting, processing and analyzing big data, is innovative in the Social Sciences and was developed in cooperation between researchers from Brazil and France.

The results show that, even with the increase in women in the profession, they remain more at the bottom, at least in the media of reference. Middle and senior positions are reserved for men. Some women find alternative ways to gain some power, working at smaller newspapers or even creating their own outlets, managing themselves as “peripheral elites”. The migration of journalists to related areas — a significant movement especially in the last decade — is also gendered: while women go to press offices, men go to audiovisual and design.