Mixed Message Media
Girls’ Voices and Civic Engagement in
Student Journalism
Piotr S. Bobkowski and Genelle I. Belmas
a
ABSTRACT
Prior research has illustrated the benefits of media literacy and production programs for girls’ self-expression and civic engagement. This study examines whether
formal high school journalism programs can be similarly beneficial. A survey of
461 high school journalists shows that girls want to use student media to address
serious topics that can contribute to their civic development. But school employees
also tell girls more often than boys not to cover sensitive issues in the student
media, and girls are more likely than boys to acquiesce to such requests. Girls will
not glean the full benefits of journalism education until such disparate treatment
is addressed. Journalism educators and school administrators may profit from the
feminist pedagogical approaches developed in out-of-school media-focused programs in which girls have demonstrated significant willingness to express themselves and are unencumbered to do so.
KEYWORDS
censorship, civics, education, engaged citizenship, journalism, media production,
pedagogy

b

Evidence accumulating at the intersection of girlhood studies and media
studies suggests that it is developmentally beneficial for girls to engage in
the creation of self-expressive media (Blair et al. 2010; Kearney 2006;
Moscowitz and Carpenter 2014; Vargas 2009). Studies examining girl-centered media literacy and production programs describe spaces in which girls
with women mentors critically evaluate media, develop production skills,
and create media imbued with girls’ voices. Programs like these can foster
an engaged citizenship among participating girls (Caron 2011).
The educational programs discussed in this literature often operate outside of formal school structures: the participants meet outside school hours,
often not on school grounds, and the programs are not led by school personnel. But there are also school-sponsored and curricular settings in which
girls can use media to develop and exercise their voices and practice civic
Girlhood Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 89-106
© Berghahn Books
doi: 10.3167/ghs.2017.100107
ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online)

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PIOTR S. BOBKOWSKI AND GENELLE I. BELMAS

engagement. One school subject suitable to providing such a platform is
journalism, as are related co-curricular and extracurricular hands-on activities like the production of the school newspaper, yearbook, or news website.
This article presents formal, school-sponsored journalism education
programs as a potentially valuable yet imperfect setting for the development
of girls’ voices and their civic engagement. Civic engagement encompasses
the actions citizens take to participate in society, including advocating for
social change, contributing time and resources to civic organizations, and
voting. We discuss the nature and ideal outcomes of school-sponsored journalism education and explain the legal framework that supports restrictions
on student expression. We then present survey data that illustrates that
journalism education can nurture girls’ sense of civic engagement, but also
that school officials often impede girls from realizing journalism education’s
full potential.

Journalism Education
There are valid reasons for establishing out-of-school, girl-focused media
literacy and media production programs. Girls who participate in out-ofschool programs may be more willing to express themselves within these
programs than in conventional classroom settings. By functioning outside
school structures, these programs avoid the in-school norms that often marginalize adolescent girls like, for example, teachers’ outsize focus on disruptive boys and the expectation that girls act nicely, silently, and obediently
(Brown 1998). Such programs may be especially beneficial for girls from
disadvantaged and immigrant backgrounds whose economic and cultural
alienation may complicate the development of well-integrated self-identities
and self-expressions (Brown 1998; Mann 2004; Vargas 2009). Out-of-school
programs also allow facilitators greater pedagogical freedom than do schoolsponsored settings (Moscowitz and Carpenter 2014), perhaps resulting in
more authentic relationships between girls and their mentors.
Formal journalism education, however, also offers a unique environment
that can affirm girls’ experiences, help girls critically evaluate and produce
media, and nurture girls’ civic engagement. Because journalism education
is incorporated within the US education system, it enjoys institutional support in many schools, including being allocated designated teachers, instructional space, and technology; each year thousands of girls in the United
States participate. More than 90 percent of secondary schools in the United
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States offer curricular or extracurricular journalism opportunities, and
approximately 18 percent of US students in grades 10 to 12 take journalism
classes or produce student news publications or digital media (Bobkowski
et al. 2012, 2017). While white students are more likely than non-white
students to participate in for-credit journalism programs, there are no racial
or ethnic discrepancies in extracurricular journalism program participation
(Bobkowski et al. 2017).
Many students enter journalism through self-selection, aiming to
develop their aptitude for self-expression, writing, or engagement. While
some students may pursue journalism for the benefit of their college applications or application portfolios, many have less instrumental motivations
(Lightman and Hoechsmann 2014). Former participants in one out-ofschool journalism program recalled being motivated by the ability to effect
change by writing to a large audience about issues and ideas that mattered
to them (Lightman and Hoechsmann 2014). National US data shows that
students who end up participating in journalism start out with higher grades
and higher self-efficacy in English, and some are also more involved in school
activities than non-journalists (Bobkowski et al. 2017).
In numerical terms, journalism classrooms are dominated by girls and
women. National US figures show that in the graduating class of 2004, 68
percent of high school journalists were female and that, accounting for other
factors, female students were twice as likely to take journalism as their male
counterparts (Bobkowski et al. 2017). Journalism teachers also tend to be
female, with a 3:1 or 4:1 female-to-male ratio among them (Dvorak et al.
1994; Filak et al. 2009). There is considerable potential, therefore, for journalism classrooms to constitute the educational environments that Brown
(1998) envisions, in which girls’ expressions are valued and validated by
female authority figures.
Although some research characterizes student journalism as merely
depicting and perpetuating high school rituals and rites of passage like
dances and sports (Hoffman 2005), high school journalists can use their
media to address consequential issues, and thus learn how to become
engaged citizens through the use of media. Journalism education can promote the development of media-focused civic skills that constitute what
experts have called civic communication competence and digital proficiency (Jenkins 2009; Shah et al. 2009). Research shows that student journalists identify service to their peers about issues that matter to them as an
important element of their journalistic work (Clark and Monserrate 2011:
429). Journalism classrooms can serve as safe spaces in which students iden91

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tify issues that matter to them, become educated on these issues, discuss
them with their peers and teachers, and learn how to communicate effectively about them to the broader community (Östman 2013). Journalistic
work stimulates the didactic practices that, according to civic education
experts, effectively foster students’ civic habits and orientations (Gibson
and Levine 2003). These include discussions of current issues and events,
engagement in service learning, contributing to how a school functions,
and participating in democratic processes. Research shows that taking journalism in high school is related to civic engagement beyond high school,
with former high school journalists voting more often in their late teens
and 20s than those students who did not take journalism (Bobkowski and
Miller 2016).
While journalism education can address Caron’s call for media-making
programs to help girls become “citizens despite their unachieved legal status as minors” (2011: 78), this potential often goes unrealized because
school officials can limit what students communicate about in schoolsponsored media.

Legal Barriers to Ideal Journalism Education
Students’ ability to communicate freely about the topics they deem important stands at the core of how journalism education contributes to civic
development. The issues that students find important to talk about today—
wartime concerns, sexuality, drug use and so on—echo the issues that
sparked past litigation and contributed to the current legal precedent on
student speech in the United States.
While professional journalists in the United States enjoy robust constitutional protection, the country’s Supreme Court has chipped away at
the protection it initially afforded student speech in the 1969 landmark
case Tinker v. Des Moines School Dist. (hereafter called Tinker). The case
originated when middle school siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker and a
friend wore bands of black cloth on their sleeves to school to signify their
resistance to the Vietnam war. Despite the fact that there were no recorded
disruptions such as hostilities or confrontations in response to these armbands, the school board suspended the students under a hastily-passed policy forbidding the wearing of black armbands in Des Moines schools.
When the case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Abe Fortas, writing for
the majority, penned the oft-repeated paean to student speech rights: “It
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can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”
(Tinker 1969: 506). Fortas articulated a two-part test that would necessitate
the finding of, first, an actual disruption resulting from the speech act,
and, second, a material disruption of normal discipline and operation of
the school.
This permissive environment for student speech did not last. In 1986,
in Bethel School District v. Fraser, which raised the question of sexual innuendo in school, and in 2005, in the “Bong HiTs for Jesus” case (Morse v.
Frederick), which dealt with the alleged encouragement of drug use, the
Court allowed administrators wide latitude in censoring student expression.
However, it was in 1988 that the Court came down with arguably the most
devastating opinion for student speech freedom. In 1998, in Hazelwood
School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier (hereafter referred to as Hazelwood), the Court said
that it was within administrative power to pull articles from a student newspaper if administration deemed them possibly problematic. Student reporter
Cathy Kuhlmeier and two other female journalists wrote a two-page spread
in their high school newspaper dealing with divorce and teen pregnancy.
The principal felt that the articles were inappropriate for Hazelwood East
High School readers and ordered them removed from the paper. Justice
Byron White, supporting the school administration, wrote for the Court:
“[E]ducators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial
control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored
expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” (Hazelwood 1988: 273). Administrators, then,
can censor school-sponsored publications at will as long as those censorial
actions advance “legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
Thus, two legal tests for student speech protection exist in an uneasy
relationship: Tinker, in which there must be a proven relationship between
any school disruption and the allegedly offending speech, and Hazelwood,
in which administration is given great leeway in determining the appropriateness of on-campus student media products as long as their decisions are
reasonably tied to pedagogical concerns. Laws in ten states (Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Maryland, Massachusetts,
and North Dakota), and in the District of Columbia afford Tinker-level protections to student journalists. But research in Californian schools shows
that some school officials continue to prevent students from publishing stories on certain topics despite the state law that prohibits such restraints
(Amster 2006).
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While the First Amendment and its associated rights are unique to the
United States, internationally, Article 13 of the 1990 UN Convention on
the Rights of the Child (CRC) gives children the “freedom to seek, receive
and impart information and ideas of all kinds,” subject to regulation for
“respect of the rights or reputations of others” and “the protection of
national security or of public order … or of public health or morals”
(United Nations Human Rights Commission 1990: n.p.). The treaty thus
blends the sweeping encouragement for student expression outlined in Tinker with the concerns about morality and safety that characterize the Hazelwood ruling. Even without formal laws the treaty’s 196 ratifying nations do
have legal protection in place and could adopt additional protections under
the CRC’s ambit (the United States is a signatory but has not ratified the
treaty) but it is unclear if any countries have done so, particularly in the
context of youth journalism.
While the value of journalism education for civic development lies in
students’ ability to voice their ideas, legal contexts that allow school administrators and teachers to curtail student speech limit journalism’s full civic
potential.

Girls’ Voices in High School Journalism
While many girls enroll in formal journalism education, research thus far
has not examined the extent to which girls aim to use student media to
address civic-oriented issues, and if they do, how successful they are in
doing so. Some evidence suggests that student media focuses primarily on
stereotypical high school events and rituals (Hoffman 2005), and thus civic
issues may not be a priority for student journalists. Therefore, the first
research question we address with the data collected for this study is this:
Do female high school journalists identify civic issues for coverage in their
student media? We also consider three realities related to girls’ journalism
and freedom of expression for which we expected to find evidence in
the data.
First, girls may be more likely than boys to identify issues and topics
that cause discomfort for their teachers and administrators, and thus be more
likely to be asked not to cover some issues in the student media. As Brown
and Gilligan (1993) observe, the experiences and points of view that adolescent girls want to articulate often undermine patriarchal norms and structures. Girls also tend to be more engaged in their schools than boys (Feldman
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and Matjasko 2007), and so they may have a clearer understanding of the
school’s issues, including contentious ones, that should be addressed publicly. Girls’ noises and voices tend to be regulated more strictly than those
of boys (Gordon 2006). We hypothesized first, therefore, that school
employees disproportionately silence female student journalists.
Second, we predicted that among the students who are told not to discuss certain issues in their media, girls are more likely than boys to acquiesce
because girls are less confident than boys in how teachers evaluate their selfexpression. Girls tend to be more interested than boys in pleasing their teachers in writing assignments (Cleary 1996). Girls also appear to lose more
confidence than boys in their writing ability and, unlike boys, tend not to
overstate their writing skills (Lee 2013; Pajares and Valiante 1999). Administrators’ or teachers’ requests not to discuss something in the media may
tap into girls’ insecurities about having their self-expression rejected.
Finally, we considered the issues that teachers and school administrators
are most likely to ask their student journalists to avoid. Prior research showed
that school officials object to content that can cause discord in the school
community, including divisive political and social issues, and stories that may
reflect negatively on the school’s employees (for example, school policies and
losing athletic teams), or student behaviors (such as teen sex and drug use)
(Filak et al. 2009; Nelson 1974). We expected to learn that student journalists
would continue to be asked not to cover these topics. Since prior research
has not considered whether girls are more likely than boys to be asked not to
cover specific topics, we also examined this question in our analysis.

Survey of High School Journalists
To assess whether our predictions about girls’ voices in high school journalism were accurate, we conducted a survey of high school journalists at five
one-day journalism workshops that were held across a southeastern US state
in fall 2015. The workshops were sponsored by a statewide organization that
supports high school journalism through education and recognition programs. Four of the workshops were hosted on college campuses and one was
hosted at a media company. All study procedures were approved by the
human subjects committee at our home institution.
Of the 461 high school journalists responding to the survey, 361 (78
percent) were female and 100 (22 percent) were male. This approximates
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the general composition of high school journalism classes across the United
States (Bobkowski et al. 2017).
Other than whether they identified as male or female, we did not ask
students to disclose demographic information. Our survey consisted of only
five questions that addressed our focal concerns. We reasoned that asking
for minimal identifying information would encourage students to write candidly about sensitive topics. Attendance information from the sponsoring
organization suggests that the attending schools represented diverse populations from across the state. Of the 19 schools attending the largest workshop, for instance, 16 schools were public and 3 private; 11 schools were
located in cities and suburbs, 3 in mid-size and small towns, and 5 in rural
areas. Overall, these schools’ racial and ethnic compositions and their students’ socioeconomic backgrounds (measured by eligibility for free or
reduced-price lunch) approximated the demographics of the state’s student
population (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.).
In addition to asking about the respondents to self-identify as either
female or male, the survey asked four questions:
(1) What important issues or topics should be discussed in your student media?
(2) Have you been told by a school employee not to discuss a topic or issue in
your student media?
(3) Have you refrained from discussing a topic or issue in your student media
because you anticipated a negative reaction from the school?
(4) What were the topics or issues that you were asked not to discuss, or refrained
from discussing, in your student media?

We coded the open-ended responses to the first and fourth questions.
The first question was based on our interest in whether or not the issues that
students wanted covered in their media were civics-oriented. We reasoned
that any substantive issue can teach journalism students about using media
for civic purposes, but that there is less opportunity for civic lessons when
students cover only routine school events like dances and sporting events.
We thus coded as civics-oriented responses to the first question that dealt with
issues outside of regular school events. We identified 55 unique issue categories in students’ responses to the fourth question and then matched them
to the two broad categories of censured student speech identified in prior
research (that is, divisive current issues and topics that cast school employees
or students in a negative light). One coder coded all of the responses to the
two questions. To establish intercoder reliability, a second coder double-coded
15 percent of the responses, arriving at an agreement rate of 97 percent for
the first question and 100 percent for the fourth question.
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Survey Findings
The survey’s results supported the notion that girls who participate in
school journalism want to cover issues in their media that can promote
their civic development. Of the 338 girls who answered the first question,
72 percent (n = 243) identified topics beyond the stereotypical content of
school newspapers and yearbooks. For instance, reflecting both the service
and civics-oriented nature of journalism, one girl wrote that her student
media should cover “[t]opics people will be interested in, but it is important
to discuss topics outside of the reader’s comfort zone to inform [the readers]
of current events.” Another girl illustrated the potential of student media
to boost her fellow students’ political development; she wrote that her
media should cover “[p]residential candidates and the upcoming election;
how teens can make an impact on politics.” These responses illustrate that
student journalism can help foster girls’ civic voices. Girls were slightly
more likely than boys to identify civics-oriented topics (65 percent of boys
did so), but a chi-square test showed that this gender difference was not
statistically significant [χ2(1) = 1.73, p = .19].
More than a third of the student journalists in this survey (38 percent,
n = 174) indicated that they were told to refrain from discussing some issue
in their school media. As we predicted, a greater proportion of female students (41 percent) than male students (28 percent) was told by a school
employee to refrain from discussing some issue or topic in their school
media. A chi-square test confirmed that this was a statistically significant
difference [χ2(1) = 5.14, p = .02].
We had predicted that among the students who were told by a school
employee to refrain from discussing some issue or topic in their school
media, female students would be more likely to acquiesce than male students. Indeed, 88 percent of female students as opposed to 64 percent of
male students who were asked to refrain from an issue actually refrained
from discussing it in their student media. A chi-square test again confirmed
that this was a statistically significant difference [χ2(1) = 10.26, p = .001].
Table 1 presents a list of the issues and topics that more than 1 percent
of the respondents said they were unable to cover in their media. As in prior
studies, student journalists were asked not to discuss divisive political and
social issues, including the legalization of marijuana (16 percent), and LGBT
issues and gay marriage (15 percent). Nearly one in 10 students (9 percent)
said that they could not cover issues that were generally controversial, that
might offend, upset, disturb, be harmful, touchy, or sensitive. Students were
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Table 1: Topics Student Journalists Were Told Not to Discuss or Refrain
from Discussing in the Student Media

Topic
Drugs, the legalization of marijuana
LGBT issues and students, gay marriage
Religion
Topics that are controversial, might offend, upset,
disturb, be harmful, are touchy, sensitive
Politics, political issues
Negative events, anything that puts school in
negative light, bad press
Related to mental health and suicide
Race and racism
Students getting in trouble
Weapons, gun control, shootings
Abortion
Sex and pregnancy
Dress code policies
Alcohol
Confederate flag, “southern pride”
Teachers acting inappropriately, discip. action
Gender, gender inequality, feminism, sexism
Vandalism
Poor athletic performance
School policies
Private/personal issues
Policy on Santa Claus, Halloween (Christian school)
Academic and test results
Music, explicit lyrics, R-rated movies, music festivals
Threat toward school
Car accidents, local tragic news
Rumors, gossip
Relationships, fights, drama
School governance
School rivalries and other schools

Category

Percentage
of students
mentioning topic

1, 2
1
1

16
15
14

1, 2
1

12
9

2
2
1
2
1
1, 2
2
2
2
1
2
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
1, 2
2
2
2
2

9
8
8
6
6
5
4
4
4
4
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
2
2
2
2

Note: Category codes: 1 = divisive current issues; 2 = topics that reflect poorly on the
school’s employees or students.

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also told not to cover stories that suggested the school’s employees or students were somehow flawed. These included stories discussing mental health
and suicide (8 percent), sex and pregnancy (4 percent) dress code policies
(4 percent), and teachers acting inappropriately (3 percent).
The following verbatim responses from girl journalists illustrate the
restrictions with which they contend:
We are asked to refrain from discussing any topic that would shed negative light
on our school even if it is honest and important.
Talking about anything religious, any sort of subject that may raise eyebrows (pregnancy rates in high schools, abortion, politics).
We were told not to mention any of our athletic teams losing.
We are asked to not talk about serious topics like suicides and car accidents.
We were asked to not write about the Confederate flag.
We were not to write about standardized tests that would make the school look bad.
We refrained from writing about anything that required anonymity, in case we
were asked to reveal names.

In all, there were no statistically significant differences in the proportions of
girls and boys who were told not to discuss specific issues.

Discussion
Each year thousands of girls in the United States take journalism and produce student media in school-sponsored journalism programs. Student
newsrooms can nurture girls’ voices and media-centered civic skills, much
like the out-of-school media literacy and media-making programs that several girlhood scholars have written about (Blair et al. 2010; Kearney 2006;
Moscowitz and Carpenter 2014; Vargas 2009). Our study confirms that girl
journalists take their journalism seriously and, based on the topics and issues
they identify for coverage in their media, their journalism education supports
their civic development. Most of the girls who participated in our survey
said that they want to cover issues of importance that matter to their readers.
It is through the exploration and articulation of substantive issues that student journalists can develop the skills and dispositions that support their
civic participation beyond high school.
Our study also shows, unfortunately, that girls’ experiences in journalism
often echo their experiences in other classrooms where their points of view
are sidelined and their enthusiasm for self-expression extinguished (Brown
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1998; Brown and Gilligan 1993). Gordon (2006) recounts the disturbing
experience of two girls in a math class taping their mouths closed to graphically symbolize their lack of opportunity to speak. Our survey shows that
school officials are more likely to suppress girls’ voices than boys’ and that
girls are more likely to comply when asked to refrain from addressing specific
issues or topics. Despite its potential to serve as a training ground for girls’
self-expression and media-centered civic engagement, in many cases journalism is used to perpetuate the silencing of girls.
The issues that administrators and teachers prevent student journalists
from covering today have changed little in more than 40 years (Nelson
1974); this reflects a lack of development in officials’ pedagogical approach
toward journalism education. It appears that administrators and teachers
prefer student media to highlight only the positives about their schools thus
serving as the schools’ public relations mouthpiece (Thomas 1995).
Our survey shows that by choosing censorship, school officials miss valuable opportunities to help their students explore and understand better some
of the key issues of the day. In the months and years prior to this survey, the
professional media covered the decriminalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana in several states, but 16 percent of student journalists in
our survey reported being unable to address this topic in their student media.
Similarly, while the Supreme Court’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was
one of the central news stories the summer prior to our survey, 15 percent
of the student journalists in our survey said they could not report on samesex marriage or discuss LGBT issues in their media. The approach that these
students’ school officials took short-circuits journalism’s capacity to instill
in students civic communication competencies.
We prefer to treat our results as a call to action rather than as a forecast
of continued disparate treatment of girls in journalism education. Both
research and past history suggest that girls will continue to fight for their
voices to be heard. The legal cases in this area demonstrate that censorship
is suffered by students named Cathy and Mary Beth, and that some of them
fight against it. Journalism Education Association’s (2016) National High
School Journalist of the Year award similarly demonstrates girls’ resilience:
all the winners between 2010 and 2015, and in many previous years, have
been female. Far from being victims, these women, and countless others,
continue their daily battles against being silenced and/or censored.
Girls may reclaim their voices in other ways less likely to invite administrative surveillance including through zines and online sites. As Gordon
points out, silencing in one area can also open up a space “where girls can
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concentrate … on educational achievement or on their own fantasies”
(2006: 7). Not only do we not condone the silencing of girls, we acknowledge that girls have exercised and reclaimed their ability to speak in places
outside of journalism. Girls are also not afraid to express themselves online;
adolescent girls are the largest demographic of bloggers (Davis 2010), and
they also use their collections on the online bulletin board Pinterest to
express their identities (Almjeld 2015).
We call on girlhood scholars to provide better outreach to journalism
educators. What have we learned from out-of-school media programs that
educators should be applying in school-sponsored journalism classrooms?
What is it about zines, for example, that empowers girls, and how can that
be transferred to journalism courses? Conversely, what journalistic techniques could be incorporated in zine production to assist girls in getting
their voices heard?
We hope to reach more than an American journalism education audience with this research. This study is about the great potential for young
women internationally to benefit from doing acts of journalism. Whether
those acts take place in school, after school, in stand-alone newspaper courses
or as part of English or social studies curricula, the research shows abundantly how much girls can profit from speaking and writing about issues of
importance to them without fear of administrative retribution. As noted
earlier, the Convention on the Rights of the Child includes the right to speak
thus indicating that it is a right important enough to enumerate. The fact
that today we express concern about the silencing of girls should give educators pause to revisit the ways in which their actions speak to these students.
Pedagogies that take into account a feminist perspective are welcome, as
Troutman suggests, to “move feminism, via pedagogical approaches, back into
the classroom, thus rendering it transparent and fully applicable to classroom
populations across disciplines” (2011: 143). While Troutman applies her
inquiry to media literacy, the idea of a feminist pedagogical approach to journalism education carries with it the potential to empower girls by making sure
that they are heard and read on an equal footing with their male classmates.
Feminist scholar hooks outlines in her aptly titled book, Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom, the importance of a radical, critical, and
inclusive classroom that allows all to speak and be heard. She points out that
teaching is performative, and that those performances “serve as a catalyst that
calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning” (1994: 11). Allowing girls to choose controversial topics to
discuss in their own voices encourages their active participation.
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Moreover, girls do not suffer being silenced only in the United States.
This kind of sexism is a global phenomenon. For example, Gordon’s (2006)
study of girls’ noise and voice evaluated the behavior of Finnish students,
and Gilbert (1989) focused on Australia and the UK as well as on the United
States. Toh and Leonardelli (2013) took a global look at cultural constraints
on women leaders in 32 countries in a study that suggests that to be considered a leader, an individual must both self-categorize as a leader and be
viewed as such by others. Charisma and intellect were two defining factors
of leaders, and both require that women who aspire to leadership be heard.
Our study’s limitations include the single-state nature of our sample,
the workshop setting within which we administered the survey, and the small
number of questions we asked. Our findings would benefit from the inclusion of students from other states. Student journalists in some states enjoy
greater legal speech protections than do students in our survey, and journalism teacher requirements differ among states. Also, our findings may have
differed if we had administered the survey in schools rather than at workshops. It is possible that the students and teachers who attended the workshops are engaged in journalism at a level that is above average, and that this
resulted in views that do not represent those of average journalism students.
Finally, although our survey questions covered our interests and predictions,
a greater number of questions would have offered a richer context for understanding girl journalists’ experiences.

Conclusion
We leave to future research questions of how girls’ attitudes and tendencies
relate to their ideas for journalistic coverage, and the extent to which
injunctions affect their subsequent engagement in journalism. We have little data about what the actual implications of being told not to cover something in the student media are. One possibility is that girls get disillusioned
and leave journalism, a possibility that aligns with the absence of women
in professional journalism leadership roles (Griffin 2014). Alternatively,
silenced girls may become motivated to assert their rights. High school
journalists have a more inclusive understanding of the First Amendment’s
free-speech rights than their peers who do not take journalism (Dautrich
et al. 2008), possibly resulting from the negotiations that journalism students undertake between what they want to cover and what they are
allowed to cover by school officials.
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Contextual questions also deserve greater scrutiny in future work,
including whether adviser and administrator characteristics and experience
matter in the level of protection that girl journalists receive, and how best
to communicate with these adults about the value of girl journalists’ voices.
Future research also may consider issues of intersectionality. Our short survey
asked only the sex of the participants but undoubtedly other background
facts such as race or ethnicity, family socio-economics, sexual orientation,
and gender identity, for instance, as well as their immigrant status (if this is
applicable) shape young journalists’ autonomy and how they respond to
injunctions on their expression.
a

PIOTR BOBKOWSKI is Assistant Professor in the William Allen White School
of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas. His
research focuses on information sharing in social media, media uses and
effects among adolescents and emerging adults, and student journalism.
GENELLE BELMAS is Associate Professor and News and Information Track
Chair in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas. Her research focuses on media law,
particularly scholastic journalism and flag law, and media ethics.
b

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