Is there a glass ceiling for women in publishing? I may not be the only one who thinks so. Womensenews, a nonprofit independent news service covering issues of particular concern to women, reports that "Study after study into sex roles in the media continue to show that women have a long way to go before their voices are really heard, either as guiding forces from within the news organization or as credible sources from without."

The article quotes the chair of the Internatonal Women's Media Foundation: "One of the things that we'd like to do during our tenure is to reach out to more up-and-coming journalists to help them find the paths they most desperately wanted to find in leadership." Hel-lo!

The IWMF also follows these issues. Last year they published a report, which I doubt I ever saw or heard about at the time, called "Women Reaching for the Top: Initiatives for Media Leadership."

I liked this bit:
"Perhaps most relevant are the report's analysis of the barriers to women's success in news leadership positions and its strategies for overcoming them. As Gail Evans, executive vice president of CNN, pointed out during the May 2000 International Leadership Conference, sometimes the barriers are self-constructed.

"'If there are six seats at the [management] table, and five of them are held by men, and one is held by a woman, every other woman in the organization thinks there is one seat open. …There isn't. There are six seats open. …We pit ourselves against each other because we only see one seat.'"

There's also a nice women in leadership resource list.