Smash it up

Who better to ask about the rising power of women execs than our boss

AS I READ about the accomplished female leaders in the pages coming up in this magazine, I am reminded of how much things have changed since I started my own career nearly four decades ago.

I didn’t see a lot of women in business growing up in a small town in north-central Alberta or, for that matter, women in occupations outside the traditional ones: nurses, school teachers, shop clerks, waitresses.

The idea that I would one day be one of the most senior media executives in Canada, managing a multi-million-dollar budget and guiding the work of hundreds of journalists across the country would never have crossed my mind. Or the minds of the people in that small town who thought I was an odd duck, reading my way through the small local library and, thanks to some inappropriate selections from the adult section, daydreaming about the glamorous and slightly louche lives being lived in New York and Paris.

I was actually headed for a career as a teacher when I got a part-time job typesetting for the student newspaper at the University of Alberta. I saw aspiring journalists of both genders arguing too loudly, smoking too much and writing passionately to produce The Gateway. I was hooked on everything but the smoking. I went back to school, taking a handful of courses and working full time as a student journalist.

But the professional newsrooms of the 1980s were not that welcoming for female journalists. The atmosphere is captured in journalist Vivian Smith’s 2015 book Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love and Leave Their Newspaper Careers. Predatory male managers; female leaders relegated to the “soft” sections such as arts and lifestyles, and alcohol-fuelled late-night networking that was hard for young women, particularly young mothers, to partake of.

Still, there were some who had surmounted the challenges, women like Montreal Gazette editor in chief (later Senator) Joan Fraser, Edmonton Journal publisher Linda Hughes, and, before them, Shirley Sharzer, who made it to the rank of deputy managing editor of the Globe and Mail in the 1970s. “Women have to dress like men, act like ladies and work like dogs,” she once said. It wasn’t quite that bad when I entered my first major newsroom, but many colleagues remembered when it was.

Those women and a handful of others were beacons of possibility. And many of my colleagues at the Montreal Gazette were pioneering female journalists, among them Helen Rochester, one of the first female restaurant critics in Canada, and Doris Giller, legendary books editor, for whom the Giller Prize is named. I worked my way up, transitioning from being a reporter to a copy editor to a manager.

None of that would have been possible without the dogged work that Shirley Sharzer described, as well as the mentorship of women and men along the way who encouraged me to try new things, who opened doors to place me in leadership positions and who coached me about everything from progressive disciplinary action to practical life skills. “Keep a bottle of black shoe polish in your desk drawer at all times for emergency touch-ups,” one of them said.

Along the way, the media industry began to change. Newsrooms became more gender blind and more parent-friendly. More women made their way into leadership positions. And I ended up as editor in chief of metropolitan newspapers in Victoria, Edmonton and Montreal before becoming senior vice-president of Postmedia Network Canada Corp.’s editorial division. As of fall 2021, five of the 10 members of the company’s senior leadership team are female.

There is so much more work to do, though. We need to make our newsrooms more diverse and inclusive so they better reflect the demographics of contemporary Canada. And we need to continue to support and mentor young leaders so they can continue to transform our industry.

I began my current job three years ago, and two of my female colleagues presented me with a congratulatory card, a couple of jokes about the “glass cliff” and a slender gold bracelet. On it were these words: “She believed she could, so she did.”

Thanks to all the women along the way who helped me believe. Let’s propagate that sentiment as we expand our enterprises to include those who are not represented now.

As of fall 2021, five of the 10 members of the company’s senior leadership team are female