Ageism in Media - For Women It's Double Trouble

In Canada we witnessed the sudden departure of a top female anchorwoman on the most watched national news broadcast.

Lisa LaFlamme held the national anchor position at CTV News since November 2011. Lisa was an extremely well regarded and recognized journalist and well known for her coverage of major international stories. Along with many awards, Lisa recently won the Canadian Screen Awards best anchor at the time of her release.

You can imagine it was quite the surprise when Lisa took to the Twitter to announce her sudden departure from the role. She shared that she was blindsided by her release and how after 30 years and at the age of 58 she suddenly found herself out of the job she loved as her contract was not renewed due to a change by her employer in their “business direction”. Here is her announcement;

Now what is also interesting about this situation is that you can't help but compare Lisa's exit to that of her predecessor.

Lloyd Robertson, stayed in his role of lead anchor until the age of 77. When he left, he was given a formal “send off” and the opportunity to reminisce on air about his career.

This was not the case for Lisa.

She was left to independently announce her own exit. Granted, there may be circumstances that we may not be aware of in this situation but on the surface this certainly seems like a case that might involve gendered ageism. And here’s why I am suggesting this.

As reported by Nasdaq, a Nielsen research study discovered;

“When it comes to representation on TV, Gracenote Inclusion Analytics show that men are on-screen more than women (62% screen time vs. 38%), even though women make up more than half of the U.S. population. But for women over age 50, who represent 20% of the population, the share of time on-screen plummets to just 8%.”.

To even compound this gendered ageism theory further, there were reports that there were questions from her employer as to Lisa's decision to let her hair go grey over the course of the pandemic when dyeing hair was not an option. 

As the Genna Davis Institute on Gender in Media shares;

“Among characters 50+, men are far more common on screen than women; of all 50+ characters, men are 4 out of 5 in film, 3 out of 4 in broadcast television, and 2 out of 3 in streaming television.”.

The person replacing Lisa as the anchorperson is a 39 year old male. Now I’m not proposing that Lisa’s replacement is not qualified, but I am wondering why her employer felt the necessity to remove Lisa when she was obviously regarded as the best anchorwoman in the industry for the last two years.

So was Lisa caught in a gendered ageism trap?

When the media company she worked for made this “business decision”, were they actually buying into the idea of gendered ageism that we continue to see in the media for women over 50?

I'm not sure if we will ever will learn the real reasons for Lisa’s release. My hope is that the attention that this situation garnered will highlight the inequalities of gendered ageism in media and we begin to see some significant shifts and changes in these attitudes.

Because we lost a very visible woman over 50 on television at a time when we should be adding more.