International- Insider spoke to five
women inwar journalism about their careers and covering the war inUkraine . - Female war reporters encounter bias and barriers in the field, but have certain advantages as well.
Nima Elbagir, CNN's chief international investigative correspondent, was reporting from Kharkiv when she asked a Ukrainian soldier to bring her team closer to the front line. A mile away, Russian soldiers had occupied a Ukrainian village and were launching shells into the densely populated area.
As explosions rumbled in the distance, the soldier pointed at Elbagir's male colleague, a photojournalist.
"I'll take you closer to the firing positions and to the front line, but I'll only take him," he told her.
For Elbagir, and many women reporting from conflict zones, that kind of hindrance to their work is nothing new. But as her grandmother used to say, "If you behave as if the rules don't apply to you, then they won't."
"I was just like, 'Yeah, you're going to need to take me as well,' and just smiled at him," she told Insider. "I think it allows me to not be upset. Probably on a broader sociopolitical level, we should all still be upset. But I'm here to do a job."
Women continue to play a prominent role in ongoing coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite war journalism remaining a male-dominated field. Flipping through
Women in war journalism still encounter bias and barriers
Journalism as a whole remains predominantly white and male. A 2018 Pew study found that 61% of US newsroom employees are male, and 77% are non-Hispanic whites.
Around five years ago, Holly Williams and her colleagues at CBS News discovered the network only stocked standard unisex flak jackets sized for men. She said CBS ordered new jackets to accommodate the growing number of women becoming war correspondents.
"I was working with a lot of men when I started out in journalism, but there were always women who I saw doing the job," she said, citing CBS News' Elizabeth Palmer, a senior foreign correspondent who joined the network in 2000, as an early role model. "I saw women on television who were foreign correspondents and war correspondents, and it never occurred to me that it was something that I couldn't do."
Not all workplaces are so supportive. When Yonat Friling asked to be transferred to the field while working at an Israeli news network, she said she was told that only men belonged in war zones. She left that job and now works as a senior field producer at Fox News' Jerusalem bureau. She saw more women than ever during her time on the ground in Ukraine, though she said the field remains mostly male.
"We need more women. We're getting there," she said. "But I think we're about, on a good day, one out of three people. On a less-than-good day, one out of 10."
I get a lot of questions from people asking how my partner feels that I'm out here. I always immediately think, 'You probably don't ask that to any of the men here.'Fox News correspondent Alex Hogan
Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent at ABC News, has reported from conflict zones around the world for decades, beginning with the Bosnian War in the 1990s. She has mentored many up-and-coming female journalists herself. Even so, she was the only woman on her team in Lviv.
"I just happened to be the only woman there, but I noticed, believe me," she said.
London-based Fox News correspondent Alex Hogan, currently stationed in Lviv, said she's usually the only woman on her team as well. This trip to Ukraine has included a female fixer and producer — a rarity, she said — but she finds herself more concerned with the bias she encounters from others.
"If anything, the issues that come up are some of the outside perspectives of other people questioning family relations that I think that a lot of female correspondents have to deal with," she said. "That can be somewhat frustrating. I get a lot of questions from people asking how my partner feels that I'm out here. I always immediately think, 'You probably don't ask that to any of the men here.'"
Elbagir, the first Black person and second woman of color to hold a chief title at CNN, said that bias is often amplified for women of color.
"For me, it's twofold, right? It's at the cross section of biases around gender and biases around race," she said. "It almost seems like there is a discomfort with competent women as much as there is with women at the front lines, and I find that very fascinating. Sometimes when you're sitting in the corridors of power, there is still a little bit of a stick in that door when it comes to acknowledging that quite possibly, although I may not look like the old white dude that you think would be able to reel off articles of international humanitarian law, we actually do know our stuff."
Women covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine report both the tactical acts of war and their impact on people's lives
Historian Anne Sebba, author of "Battling for News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter," told Insider that female wartime reporters were historically relegated to "soft news" stories about injured soldiers and orphaned children since they were barred from combat zones, until modern warfare made everywhere a combat zone.
"It was this slow realization that actually the 'soft news' was what really mattered," Sebba said. "After World War I, when there was formal trench warfare and then perhaps the officers would return to their hotels or tents or whatever — that didn't happen anymore. War had now come to the front lines. It was the women who were bombed in queues waiting for bread or trying to get water from a well. Once there was a realization that war had come to the towns and villages, and women were there to report on hospitals and orphanages, that wasn't soft news at all — that was the news."
In Ukraine, female reporters are uniquely positioned to cover aspects of the current conflict such as the refugee crisis at the border. The UN's International Organization for Migration reported that over 7.1 million people have been displaced since the war began. Because men ages 18 to 60 are required to stay in Ukraine and fight, the majority of these refugees are women traveling with their children.
Sometimes, it can even be that people slightly underestimate you when you're a woman, which I think as a journalist can work to your advantage because people lower their guard a little bit.CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams
Hogan told Insider that female reporters in Ukraine have a "slight advantage" speaking to refugees who may feel more comfortable sharing their stories with another woman.
"I do think that this story really has opened people's perspectives, regardless of gender, to the horrors of being faced with that situation, of needing to leave everything behind and start a new life just to save your kids," she said. "That is not unique to something that women could empathize with, but it has potentially allowed women covering this story to be able to foster some of those relationships, and at least approach women without some of the fear — especially given what some of these women have been through to even get to the border itself."
Williams, who has been reporting in Ukraine since 2014, has also found certain advantages to being a woman reporting from a war zone.
"In general, most people are really open to talking to a woman, and dealing with a woman, and having a woman on the front line, or interacting with soldiers," she said. "Sometimes, it can even be that people slightly underestimate you when you're a woman, which I think as a journalist can work to your advantage because people lower their guard a little bit. I think in some contexts, people see you as less of a threat."
Beyond stories centering around the human toll of the conflict, many women are also involved in the war effort, taking up arms in the fight for Ukrainian sovereignty. Hogan aims to tell their stories as well.
"If anything, the war here has shown us that women in Ukraine are ready to stand up next to their male counterparts," Hogan said. "There are old women who are learning how to shoot guns and making Molotov cocktails. There are women on the front lines fighting. There are women who are working in the hospitals and driving the ambulances. And there are women covering this war."
Today, it's normal to see female reporters on the ground in flak jackets and helmets. But the risks are real.
Unlike the years Raddatz spent reporting from conflict zones in the Middle East, there are no US troops on the ground in Ukraine.
"It's a very different kind of feeling," Raddatz said. "I think in the back of my mind, knowing all through Iraq and Afghanistan that there's a US presence in those countries, if you were injured, you would get out of there immediately … Not here, not Ukraine. You're on your own."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, seven journalists have been killed and 11 have been injured since Russia launched its invasion last month. Journalists in combat zones do everything they can to minimize the risks, but they acknowledge them as part of the job.
"In this business, you know that those situations might happen, and you do everything possible to lower the risk," Williams said. "Our goal is always to try and take people to a place where they can see what the war feels like. Obviously, the last thing we want to do is come back with any of us injured. It's quite a fine balance. It's about making smart decisions so that you get as close to what's happening as possible to really give people a sense of it, but without taking too many risks."
Friling said there's a certain amount of denial involved as well, until the unthinkable happens.
"We walk around with an imaginary shield that we are sure that nothing is going to happen to us," Friling said. "And in this situation, it's hard for us because our dearest friends and the bravest people I know that walked around just like me with this invisible armor were injured and died … It shakes you, but we need to keep telling the story. When you are a journalist, I feel that it's not just a profession. It's a cause, it's a core value to witness this and to tell the people who don't have the privilege of being there what you see."
Driven by the importance of their work, women in war journalism accept the inherent risks
Reporting from the front lines of a war is certainly not for the faint of heart. But what scares Elbagir more than shelling and bullets is emerging from a conflict zone without obtaining the necessary elements to report the story.
"I think, at the risk of sounding like a sociopath, the thing that is most scary is the idea that you didn't come back with what you needed to get, that you've taken this huge risk, that you've risked your life and each other's lives, to not come back with what you need," she said. "Even today, we were looking back through our footage, and there's a moment where you can hear the shelling is getting closer and closer and closer. I have one take to explain that to the viewer, while the noise is going on in the background, because it's so important to explain what is at risk in this corner of Ukraine, and communicate in some small way what it must be like for the people who have remained in those homes."
Ultimately, stories of war and its toll on civilian life demand to be told, and women in the field continue to prove themselves just as capable of telling them.
"People are so riveted by this story and what's happening in Ukraine," Raddatz said. "That wouldn't be happening if you didn't have people going in there and telling those stories and willing to take that risk. And you take that risk because it is so important … It's life and death. It's the future of the world. What happens in these conflict zones and whether they spread and what happens to people — that's what the risk is about. And I think that's why we all do it."