In a recent blog post, Lyra McKee tells a story that took place at a feminist-run charity when she was starting off as an investigative reporter (The brackets are McKee’s).

One day, we were in their office when the subject of my career post-university came up. “I don’t think you could be an investigative reporter,” one of them said. “You’re so nice and so small.” [I’m slim and just over five foot].

I didn’t know what my height or manners had to do with my reporting ability. She continued:

“Person X [name redacted] is an investigative reporter. He has to go drinking with loyalist terrorists in bars; that’s how he gets his stories. Could you really picture yourself doing that?”

Remember the context here: this woman was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist. Her comments weren’t motivated by sexism.

This conversation is a shame (and reminiscent of the Said to Lady Journos tumblr), but McKee’s point is broader: Investigative journalism is all about looking into crime, political corruption and other malfeasance, and that kind of work makes enemies. As Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted during a Twitter conversation called #ladymuck on investigative journalism hosted by the Women’s Media Center, “Investigative reporting is part of the immune system of democracy. We ID the muck so it can be cleaned up.” Some people (including editors and journalists, and sometimes even female journalists) don’t think that women can be good investigative journalists because they’re worried about how physically vulnerable women can be when they get in that muck.

That’s why it doesn’t seem strange that there aren’t equal numbers of female and male investigative journalists, even though women seem to outnumber men at journalism schools, according to Sheila S. Coronel, director of Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, who also took a look this week at the question of why men dominate investigative journalism.

“The face of watchdog journalism is male,” Coronel said in her blog post, but noted that this reflects the smaller number of women in journalism; women make up only 37 percent of newspaper staff, according to the Women’s Media Center. All those women journalism students likely left for public relations and online journalism, while men are more likely to pursue newspaper, wire service, TV, and radio jobs.

This is too bad, Coronel said in an email to CJR. “Having more women journalists means women’s perspectives on policy and other issues are represented more fully and women’s concerns are reflected on the front pages, not relegated to the ‘lighter’ sections of the newspaper,” she wrote.

In the end, says Kiera Feldman, a reporter for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and a contributor to The Nation, “the onus is on institutions to figure out why the numbers are what they are — and what they need to do about it.”

So, how can we — or news organizations and journalism schools — encourage women to become investigative journalists?

First, we need to remember that women journalists are, in fact, more vulnerable than men. Though most investigative reporting done in the US is not dangerous, reporting abroad can be—especially, Coronel wrote, “in countries where the rule of law is weak and the state is unable or unwilling to provide protection to journalists.”

McKee, who is based in Belfast, noted that Northern Ireland doesn’t have the same protections as the US and that reporters have been attacked by terrorists. She added, “I’ve had government officials send veiled threats/bribes through different channels.”

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Jennifer Vanasco is a CJR columnist and the former editor in chief of MTV Network's LGBT news site 365gay.com. She writes about social minorities, national politics, and culture. Her award-winning newspaper column on gay and women's issues ran for 15 years.