Is journalism gender e-qual? A study of the gendered accumulation and evaluation of digital capital in journalism

This paper examines the role of digitalisation in shaping and reproducing gender relations in journalism. It builds on the concepts of Bourdieu’s field theory to study how journalists construct the value of digital capital in this rapidly changing professional field. In the past several decades, research has widely illustrated the significant impact of technological innovation in the media industry. Researchers have acknowledged the impact of digitalisation on different layers of the journalistic profession. In the first instance, digitisation stimulated convergence, which created challenges for traditional media companies and changed the structure of the global media industry tremendously. In this context of expanding convergence, journalistic practices changed as well. In increasingly computerized newsrooms, journalists have access to a wide range of digital tools, such as social media, websites, and mobile phones, to gather and disseminate information. However, the assets of these new tools are not automatically accessible to all journalists. In order to enjoy the professional advantages of these new tools, journalists must develop specific digital skills, which often requires additional time investment and training. There are differences in the speed of adoption and in levels of digital expertise among journalists, which are often explained by age. It is interesting to observe that the gender aspect is rarely taken into account in this type of research in journalism studies, even though previous studies have shown that the technological competence of men and women is often evaluated differently. Feminist media scholars have stressed the importance of the gender perspective when studying working conditions, career trajectories and the work-life balance in journalism, but only a few of these studies have applied this perspective to technological innovation in journalism. Our study will begin to fill this gap by combining perspectives from both fields of inquiry in order to gain a better understanding of the impact of recent technological changes on gender relations in journalism. Studying this possible influence is important, because earlier research has shown that the progress of women in journalism is not linear and profoundly sensitive to structural transitions in the global media industry. Our central research question explores gender dimensions of technological innovations in journalism. We conducted 24 in-depth interviews with a cross-national sample of journalists with varying levels of digital competence. Our findings offer insight into the importance of digital expertise as a form of cultural capital in journalism. The data paints a picture of the perceptions and experiences of male and female journalists with digital tools and in the use of strategies related to digital capital in the struggle for power, status and legitimacy in the field of journalism. The results suggest that gender permeates both the evaluation and the accumulation of digital capital in journalism. There was a strong connection with other forms of capital such as gender capital and reproductive support capital. The participants also described strategies related to digital capital that could increase the status of women in the field of journalism