Testing the Connection Between Tertiary Journalism Education and the Rising Number of Female Journalists

Journalism and communication courses almost unfailingly report a majority of female students such as the Journalism Students Around the Globe project (Mellado and Hanusch 2017 Mellado, Claudia, and Folker Hanusch. 2017. “The Socialization of Journalism into the Profession: Results from a Global Survey of Journalism Students.” Presentation at the 2017 ICA conference, San Diego. [Google Scholar]), which has led scholars to assume a connection between the rise in the numbers of female journalists and the growth of academic journalism education. But as yet no study has been carried out to test this assumption, which has led us to probe the strength of that presumed link. A comparison between two baseline studies, David H. Weaver’s The Global Journalist (1998) and Hanitzsch et al.’s Worlds of Journalism Study (2019) provides the longitudinal perspective on the numbers of female journalists and educational attainment. The Worlds of Journalism Study data set permits us to see the percentages of women journalists, and of those having specialized in journalism or communication and their ages. The Journalism Students Around the Globe project offers not only percentages of female students but also the students’ stated intention whether they want to become journalists. Based on this data, we examine 19 countries to test the link between academic journalism education and the increase in women journalists, concluding that tertiary journalism education has contributed to the rise in the number of female journalists.