Lectures curated from the Women, Action and the Media 2009 Conference (WAM!) bringing together more than 600 participants to exchange observations, ideas, experiences, opinions, and tools for amplifying women’s voices in the media.

Scholarship in community psychology has invoked the metaphor of voice to describe the importance of who speaks, what topics are talked about and which individuals and groups define the rules of discourse. Public communication relates to the distribution of power and privilege, illuminating who gets to speak and who is listened to; not being heard is associated with powerlessness. When the Global Media Monitoring Project issued its most recent findings, it concluded, “The world we see in the news is a world in which women are virtually invisible.”

Similarly, the Pew Research Center found that only 30% of U.S. news coverage included even one female source. (Cable news and PBS NewsHour fared worse with only 19% of the news stories citing a woman.) This year, fewer than 14% of the op-eds published by the Washington Post were by women, and an equal percent by minorities. Researchers at Rutgers University found that almost all of the academic opinions came from men: 97% in The Wall Street Journal and 82% in The New York Times.

The White House Project, a woman’s organization committed to expanding representation of women in elected office, found that only 14% of the guests on Sunday morning public affair talk shows are female. Women were less likely to be the lead guest or be invited back for repeat appearances. And the National Urban League found that in an eighteen-month period only three black women appeared on these shows. Female members of Congress get less press mention than their male counterparts. Only 25% of Time’s most influential leaders were women. The U.S intellectual and political magazines are also dominated by male writers. The male-to-female ratio of the Atlantic was 6 to 1; Foreign Affairs 6 to 1; the New Yorker, 3.5 to 1; New York Times Magazine, 2.5 to 1; and the New Republic, 8 to 1. The absence of women is not limited to mainstream media; the guest lists of The Daily Show or the Colbert Report are 75% male. Alternate websites such as Counterpunch, ZNet and Common Dreams heavily favor male writers.

It is clear that strong action is necessary to insure the opportunity for women to speak and be heard; to abandon that goal will disempower the women’s and progressive movement and diminish true media justice in this new century.

Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) developed out of our belief that communities of dedicated individuals can educate each other by reinforcing and challenging each other’s ideas, exchanging strategies and information, sharing new ideas and perspectives, and informing and inspiring one another. We believe that conversations rather than top-down instructions bring genuine changes in women’s lives and their communities (local or global). Therefore, WAM! is carefully designed with an inclusive structure and tone, and a welcoming atmosphere that facilitates in-depth discussion, ongoing connections, and the exchange of new ideas.

WAM!provides space for women journalists, editors, publishers, media activists and women’s activists to convene, address the myriad of issues impacting women, girls and our global communities, build skills, and strategize on getting our voices more fully heard in mainstream, independent, and alternative media. Unless we create strategies to headline women’s voices on issues such as reproductive rights, immigration, militarization, violence, —to name just a few—women get sidelined, ridiculed, overlooked, or often severed from public discourse, public support and public policy-making.