While the theory of intersectionality is already seen in feminist media studies, it is rarely applied systematically in news production studies. Most research on gender and news production explores women as a unified category, ignoring inequalities among them. The current research takes an intersectional approach to studying news-making. It focuses on a case study of Israeli-Ethiopian women journalists contending with dual discrimination: racial and gendered. The aim is to conceptualize how their complex subjectivities emerge in their everyday work experience. Within my theoretical frame, I examine the gendered characteristics of news-making and the subtle obstructions facing Israeli women journalists. I also consider how Ethiopian Jews have been incorporated within the symbolic boundaries of Israeli nationhood, focusing on the women's experience. The study uses a qualitative work-history methodology: I interviewed 14 Israeli-Ethiopian women journalists from a variety of media using a 'defined self-narrative.'
Thematic analysis of the interviews reveals a dialectic picture of the professional experience of Israeli-Ethiopian women journalists: they encounter two main barriers and two main sources of strength.
First, they are blocked from entering the field of journalism due to their marginal social status. The interviewees report they are excluded from common channels into Israeli journalism, such as the selective army journalism unit or systems of personal contacts. Their economic status also discourages them from integrating into a profession that cannot guarantee occupational and economic stability. Nine of the 11 interviewees working in mainstream Israeli-Hebrew language newsrooms joined the profession through affirmative action programs promoting Israeli-Ethiopians. But while these special programs give them entry into the profession, they also, paradoxically, often reproduce their inferiority. The second barrier relates to their “token” status, which interviewees feel is inconsistent with their professionality. This status also creates impossible expectations to balance between the conflicted perspectives of the community and state authorities. Additionally, women journalists compete with the contradictory expectations of their community—which criticizes the news media for misrepresenting Israeli-Ethiopians and refuses to cooperate with it, but at the same time expects Israeli-Ethiopian journalists to lead a change in representation.
The interviewees also refer to two strengths emerging from their professional experience. First, they can express their Ethiopian identity through 'advocacy journalism'—giving voice to the silenced Ethiopian community and fighting against the racism of Israeli hegemonic society. However, this criticism, realized through legitimate professional practices in the framework of mainstream Israeli journalism, expresses their Israeli identity. Their journalistic identity is thus an efficient tool to link their Ethiopian and Israeli identities, and in this way it offers them a route from the margins to the center. Moreover, this identity enables the co-existence of the identities of individual professional and community member. Regarding the second strength, the Israeli-Ethiopian women journalists perceive their femininity as an advantage in the profession. They argue that they attain high-visibility positions based on racial attitudes that see black women as submissive and exotic, while Israeli-Ethiopian men are considered a threat.