Heather McGregor of journalism.co.uk looks at female top editors at The Wall Journal, The Financial Times and The Economist for the first time ever and what that means.

McGregor writes, “All of that is fantastic progress, and more likely to inspire other women journalists to want to be editors – after all, it is hard to be what you cannot see. The Economist/FT/WSJ trio, though, is the most critical for women in business. Full disclosure: I wrote a weekly column for the FT for 17 years under (three) male editors, before giving up when I became a full-time academic. My final editor, Lionel Barber, was fully supportive of women’s careers – he did, after all, help to appoint Roula Khalaf as editor in January 2020 when he left.

“Khalaf spoke in an interview in 2021 about taking the paper in a more women-friendly direction, striving towards a 50-50 man-woman management split, as well as increasing the proportion of women columnists and subscribers. I took a look at the prestigious Lunch with the FT profile that appears each weekend, for instance, which featured 101 men to 56 women in the three years before Khalaf took over, while the divide has been 93:64 in the three years since.

“Meanwhile at the Economist, where Zanny Minton Beddoes took over in 2015, the keywords ‘women in leadership’ yielded 30 articles in the eight years before her appointment. In the eight years since, there have been 53.”

Read more here.