How emotional labour is driving women from news product management in news

Last week, I wrote about how lack of alignment and priorities was causing frustration amongst product managers in news organisations. Without alignment from C-level stakeholders, my research found that pressures built up on the product managers, causing some to burn out, leave jobs or, in extreme cases, leave the industry.

My research found something else that product team managers and other senior stakeholders should take note of. I interviewed 17 product managers, with an even balance of men and women. Five of them had left positions or the industry, and of the five, four were women. What was going on?

Some of it was down to pay differential. “Right before I left, I was promoted ..., but there was no money involved. It was not an actual promotion to reflect the work that I had done for three years,” a product manager at a small digital outlet told me. Moreover, she found that a male colleague who had the same title as she did was given $2000 more in salary when they had both asked for pay raises. “That was pretty devastating for me,” she said.

Women in the survey struggled to find a balance between assertiveness and confidence that was acceptable in their workplace. One product manager who worked for a small print outlet said that she felt as if she was stepping on people’s toes when she did cross-functional work at her publication. She worked to develop her confidence in a leadership development course. But confident, assertive leadership by women in product management was not always rewarded. A woman working at a small digital outlet was told in an evaluation that she was “aggressive … which, as a woman, was just like ‘fuck you’”.

But the research uncovered something else, which managers will need to monitor for women on their team. They spoke about feeling the need to carry out emotional labour. “I don't know how bad this is going to sound, but as a woman, I'm kind of used to doing emotional labour so it doesn't really seem like it's an extra thing that I have to do for my job. It felt like something I always had to do,” a woman working in product management at a major broadcaster said. When I asked her what she meant by emotional labour, she gave the example of feeling the need to make sure everyone was OK after a meeting that hadn’t gone well. Another woman at a large broadcaster described something similar. "(B)eing a female-presenting person in a workplace ... I feel as though I need to be aware of the other person's emotions and (respond) to them accordingly,” she said.

Emotional labour first was researched 40 years ago.

However, when the women in my research talked about emotional labour, the behaviour they described was not due to training or expectations from their employers, but were expectations they had of themselves. I suggested that a new theory was needed to explain what these women were describing.

“To differentiate the participants’ experience from emotional labour, the research suggests a construct that is best framed as gender socialised emotional management. This term captures the emotional caretaking responsibility that women felt for those around them based on gender role socialisation,” I wrote.

I have had some pushback from women in product management because I think they interpreted my research as implying women were acting emotionally. I want to be careful and clear, because that’s not what the women I spoke to were saying. Rather, they were displaying empathy for colleagues whom they felt needed support. Emotional management isn’t acting emotionally, it is when people are doing more than their fair share of managing others’ emotions.

Next week, I’m going to go beyond my research and discuss how managers should respond.

What do I want to do when I grow up?

This is a new section. Let me know how you find it. My work at Pugpig is only the second full-time job that I’ve had that isn’t in media. After I finished my master’s degree at the end of 2021, my wife Suw and I had a plan that I would spend the next year exploring what I wanted to do. Instead, I took the job at Pugpig, and we moved back from the US (where I’m from) to the UK (where Suw’s from). Earlier this year, I decided to return to that plan and do some intentional career planning. I settled on working with both a career coach and a leadership coach. My career coach has been helping me explore different options for the next chapter in life, and my leadership coach is helping me develop my leadership skills and also develop better professional habits.

I’ll be writing a bit more about my process over the coming newsletters, but I wanted to share some excellent resources I think some of you might find useful. My leadership coach, Jo Shaw, suggested that I check out the Anxious Achiever podcast by Morra Aarons-Mele, and I’m glad I did. Episodes I’ve listened to recently cover whether people pleasing is hurting your career and also what to do when anxiety becomes a habit. For those journalists or editors who read this newsletter, the latest episode is about managing your mental health when your job is covering the US election. I’ll be sharing other resources and my career exploration in coming editions of the newsletter.

But for now, the links for this week.

When approaching innovation, it is so often about sequencing. Adam Ryan talks about their intentional and deliberate diversification plan as thy have built their business.

Newsletters have become the goto minimum viable product. For this local news operation in the US, 60% of its ad revenue comes from “high open rate newsletters”. What is a high open rate? An astounding 70%. Their newsletters have five ad slots, and they work with a single local agency to sell the spots.

This is a powerful case for audience development. It’s a combination of five lessons from a course that The Fix offered. I’ll highlight just one. “Learning about the audience you don’t have”, from Joy Mayer of Trusting News in the US. It is excellent advice for how to reach those who don’t currently engage with news. In an age of news fatigue and avoidance, Joy has some great advice.

Successes and challenges in local journalism

Local media has been going through a period of tumultuous transition since the late 1990s. From the early 1990s until the mid-Naughties, large print media groups in the US and UK kept their bottom line healthy by reducing their costs - mostly through cuts. Those cuts have been increasingly deep over the past decade.

But now, we’re seeing green shoots of growth from small, entrepreneurial shops develop new models, like Mill Media in the UK. It is one of those newsletter-led companies, and they have expanded from Manchester to other cities.

But not all start-ups are thriving. This story from California shows the challenges of a being funded by a benefactor and when that funding wanes without a sustainable business model.

This shows how much pressure the BBC and other public broadcasters are under in the age of streaming. Sitting here watching the US women gymnastics team on the BBC, I still have such deep affection for the Beeb, which gave me my break in international journalism. But they are under tremendous pressure from competitors and after more than a decade of deep cuts.

Google had said that they were going to eliminate third-party cookies, but they have reversed course. They are going to leave the decision up to users.