Visibility without power. Women journalists in Italy

There is nothing like the spreading presence of female television journalists to give public visibility (even exaggerating the real extent) to the transformation which has occurred in the gendered structure of Italian journalism during the last 25 years. Anchor women, foreign correspondents, and special correspondents are omnipresent in the main broadcast news shows and in current affairs programs. However, in spite of the large entrance of female personnel into the professional work of journalism, women at the top of a news editorial staff are still a scanty minority.In other words, even though numerous, visible and lastly appreciated, women journalists are still widely excluded from the allocation of resources of authority and power. We could, therefore, say that in the imbalance between high visibility, on the one hand, and low power, on the other, lies the key to understanding the present conditions of women in Italian journalism. The chapter re-traces the process of feminization of Italian journalism from the late Seventies onwards, and advances contextualized interpretations about the persisting imbalance of power between male and female journalists.