Anxiety a Big Part of Workplace Environment
for Hispanic Female TV Journalists

Hispanic women working as television journalists experience anxiety in their struggle to prove to themselves and others that they are worthy of their jobs, according to a 2007 Penn State study.

Thirty years after the Federal Communications Commission added women to the equal opportunity regulation mandating broadcast news stations to include minorities in all facets of news reporting, Hispanic women remain a slim minority among on-air news personalities.

The “two-fers”-- as minority women in television news came to be known following the mandate -- became a practical way to fulfill the minority and gender requirements of the FCC’s hiring policies.

Despite the FCC pressure, few research studies have focused on the quality of Hispanic women’s professional lives. Based on in-depth interviews with five Hispanic women reporters from varying cultural backgrounds and different metropolitan areas across the United States, the study found that although the women express pride about their professional achievements, they experience an ongoing anxiety as they struggle with work place competition, the strain of work schedules, the values of station management and even family expectations.

“While the women view colleagues as sources of support, they see them as a source of tension -- as the women constantly feel the pressure to prove their abilities and dispel any stereotypes associated with their age, gender, or ethnicity,” according to the study’s author, Dalia Sofia Veloza, a 2007 graduate of the Penn State’s College of Communications’ master of arts degree program.

The findings also depicted duality of emotions about salary and unofficial dress codes. The majority of the women said they were being paid at the lower end of the scale but accepted this because of the industry’s seniority system and society’s gender bias.

“Although the women believed that standards of physical attractiveness and appearance are a part of the nature of TV news, they were not completely comfortable because of experiencing pressures to please station managers and viewers, and to maintain competitiveness with their co-workers,” Veloza said.

The majority of the participants identified Affirmative Action policies as doors of opportunities for minorities but also believed that TV stations should not rely on Affirmative Action policies to fill slots with unqualified personnel.

Two of the reporters suggested that the news industry’s economic interest in attracting minority viewers would force them to include members of those populations in all aspects of the newsroom. Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the U.S. However, the presence of Hispanics in TV news still remains small in proportion to their presence in the population.

“Women working in Spanish-language media were torn between using journalism as a form of activism and the fear of hurting their careers by challenging non-Hispanic management teams unresponsive to improving the news coverage of and for the Hispanic community,” Veloza said

The study was the author’s master’s thesis titled “A Culturally-Based Study of the Work Experiences of Hispanic Women Reporters and Anchors at Spanish and English-language Television News Stations.” Veloza now works as the associate director of the Jimirro Center for the Study of Media Influence, housed in the College of Communications.

Jimirro Center
contact information:
Ann Marie Major, director
Phone: (814) 863-2370
Email:amm17@psu.edu

More on this study:
Dalia Veloza
Phone: (484) 788-9196
Email: dsv112@psu.edu

More about the Center:
About Jim Jimirro
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