The advantages of being a female foreign correspondent

By Gwen Florio

A woman in a burqa rides a donkey in northern Afghanistan. --Karl Gehring, The Denver Post

“There's only the thinnest veneer of acceptance for women as foreign correspondents, one that peels away like cheap paneling the minute it's subjected to the heat of scrutiny.”

Two scenes from Pakistan: I'm at a wedding in Islamabad, elaborate henna patterns wrapping my hands, bangles stacked on my forearms, a gauzy pink veil thrown over my head and shoulders. Women press close around me, voicing their anger at how the American bombing of neighboring Afghanistan has diminished this happiest of occasions – oh, and wouldn't I please have some more gulab jamun?

And another: This time I'm in Peshawar, near the Khyber Pass that crosses into Afghanistan, sitting at one end of a room attached to a mosque, almost in the doorway, as far as humanly possible from where a mullah addresses a circle of men. I can't understand what they're saying — the male interpreter and photographer are across the room with the other men — and know only by the furious tone and the occasional "Amreeka" that the conversation is very much something I'd like to write about. And yet, even my presence in the room was a huge concession from a mullah appalled that I'd asked to be there at all.

I think back to those two scenes when people ask whether being a woman makes it more difficult to report from Muslim countries, especially very conservative ones.

My answer? Yes.

And, no. In fact, in many ways it makes it easier. Not that it's ever easy. If I'd been a man, I'd never have been allowed to mingle with the women in the wedding in the first scene. But I would have been included in the conversation in the second. In both instances, people were upset at how the United States was handling things, and my stories reflected as much.

So which story was more important? Was the opinion of the men — some of whom ran a madrassa that educated boys and certainly influenced their attitudes — any more newsworthy than that of the women, who both influence and reflect the opinions of the men in their families?

While we're at it, any chance that we might ditch the gender thing and talk about people?

Yeah. I'm a dreamer.

If the reaction to the assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo's Tahrir Square is any indication, there's only the thinnest veneer of acceptance for women as foreign correspondents, one that peels away like cheap paneling the minute it's subjected to the heat of scrutiny.

Which ticks me off. Because as long as I can remember, I'd wanted to report from combat zones, and when I finally got to do it, it made for some the most rewarding — albeit some of the most challenging and, yes, thanks to harassment, some of the most frightening — work of my career.

Blame Life. I must have come across the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White as I paged through old copies (she left the magazine when I was only 2) as a child. However I found them, I read everything by and about her that I could. There was that great self-portrait of Bourke-White standing in a leather flight suit in front of a prop plane, hair flying, heavy camera in hand. Who wouldn't want to do that?

But I wanted to be a writer, not a photographer. About the same time, I was reading collections of Ernie Pyle's dispatches from World War II (another "I want to do that" moment). I hadn't heard then of Martha Gellhorn or Marguerite Higgins. I didn't know that women could go to war and write about it.

By the time I started at The Associated Press in 1976, however, I did know about Tad Bartimus, who'd reported from Vietnam and who was still working for the wire service as a foreign and then a national correspondent. I'd stand in front of the noisy old black teletype machines and read her stories as they printed out line by line and think, yet again, "I want to do that."

Even then, it still didn't seem possible. Bartimus was the exception.

A decade later, I was at the The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newsroom full of exceptions. Catherine Manegold was stationed from the Philippines covering the downfall of the Marcos regime; Carol Morello was based in Cairo and covered the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Barb Demick went to the Balkans, as did Fawn Vrazo from her base in London. This time, my role models' stories were scrolling across the in-house computer screens.

By the time I finally went overseas in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, many foreign correspondents for U.S. newspapers were women.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of reporters and photographers I encountered overseas were men, as were most of my sources.

The latter wasn't a complete surprise, given that I was reporting mostly from conservative Muslim countries. What I hadn't expected was that the incident at the mosque in Peshawar would prove the exception rather than the rule. By and large, men — even extremely conservative religious leaders — talked with me. The down side? The groping that escalated into something worse for Logan was a frequent occurrence that leaves me nervous in crowds to this day.

But it was more than balanced out by the fact that being a woman let me go into people's homes and talk to other women about the effects of the conflict on the civilians who bear the brunt of modern warfare. That kind of access was difficult and sometimes impossible for male reporters. It was easier for me, as a woman, to talk to men than for them to commit the unpardonable offense of approaching women. In fact, I often found myself treated as a sort of honorary man, invited on one occasion to eat dinner with the men of a household, while the women dined in a smaller room in the back of the house (to which, feeling just as cut out as I had in the mosque, I retreated after dinner).

That kind of access to women made my own reporting fuller, richer, more balanced. Even if a fellow journalist did say to me one day: "What, another story about women?"

"Yes," I replied, "another story about 50 percent of the population."

I didn't find out until after I'd returned from that first trip to Afghanistan that my editors had debated whether to send me. Not because of the expense, which was astronomical. But because I'm a woman.

Reports on Logan's assault, in which the phrase "attractive blonde" popped up all too often, spurred instant debates on whether women (presumably even unattractive non-blondes) should cover conflict. Whether mothers of young children should go to war. Whether Logan had essentially "asked for it" by doing her job.

The insults are stunning. They ignore the fact that for many years now some of the best work in conflict zones has been, and continues to be done, by women — the AP's Kathy Gannon, Carlotta Gall of the The New York Times, Robin Wright of the The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — the list is very long and there's no way to do justice to all of the fine work by all of the fine journalists who happen to be women. Which is not to say that men can't do thorough, inclusive coverage of issues that disproportionately affect women (thank you, Nicholas Kristof).

And it ignores the nuances of gender issues in other societies, nuances that can often be more easily reported by those most affected by them.

Fifty percent of the population. Giving women short shrift makes for incomplete coverage. No news organization can afford that these days.

Besides, if all those women over all those decades have proven anything, it's that women are going to find ways to get to the story. Foreign correspondents face all sorts of barriers. Those obstacles shouldn't arise before they even leave home.


Gwen Florio is the Missoulian crime & courts reporter and a former foreign correspondent for the The Denver Post after 9/11.