Veteran Washington post media critic Howard Kurtz is known for hurling slings and arrows at members of his own profession. So his recent ode to ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz was unusual—up to a point. For all his praise of Raddatz for “putting herself in the thick of things,” Kurtz apparently could not sidestep the old gender trap. He finds Raddatz remarkable because she juggles being fierce and being female. We learn that the fifty-four-year-old has been to Iraq fourteen times but still cooks dinner, and—here Kurtz quotes ABC anchor Charles Gibson—is “gritty, without sacrificing any femininity,” someone who brings “a sensibility and sensitivity to these [Middle East] issues that is tough for a male correspondent to match.”

If Kurtz’s qualified tribute to Raddatz is any indication, sexist attitudes in journalism are still commonplace. A new Swedish study shows that even in that female-friendly nation, journalism evolved as a primarily male field and continues to be defined by men. Despite the rising numbers of women in its ranks, “journalism as a field has remained male-dominated,” writes Monika Djerf-Pierre, author of “The Gender of Journalism,” which appeared in the 2007 jubilee issue of the Scandinavian academic journal, Nordicom Review. Although she draws her conclusion from a review of Sweden’s journalism history, the arc of the profession there maps well on the American case, and many of her observations shed light on the fate of women journalists in the U.S.

In both countries, the story begins in the eighteenth century with widows filling in for their late printer husbands. Few women came to journalism in other ways until the twentieth century. A period of tokenism, in which women were an occasional presence, was followed by the build-up of a critical mass of women who entered the workforce in the last twenty-five years....

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