"We Don't Contravene the Sex Discrimination Act"—female students at journalism school

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at how female postgraduate journalism students coped with problems arising out of their experiences at journalism school. The fieldwork, collected during the course of a doctorate, was primarily carried out by participant observation where I followed a cohort of students through a one year, university based journalism course. The paper focuses on how female students adjusted to problems relating to sexism on their course and argues that despite the fact that they were a close‐knit group and had indentified a shared problem which as a group they sought to solve, no group solution to the problem emerged. It is argued that this is partly due to the fact that journalism is a male dominated occupation, particularly on the print side, and, as such, problems relating to female gender were marginalised. The students coped with the problem by either ignoring it or redefining it as unthreatening because they were unprepared to challenge staff members and so make themselves vulnerable during critical periods of their training.