Women's Media Awards celebrate honorees elevating women in media

Four hundred people gathered last night at the 2019 WMC Women’s Media Awards at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City to honor a variety of women whose work embodies the WMC mission of making women visible and powerful in media. From a computer scientist, to a haute couture designer, to, of course, journalists, this year’s honorees inspired the audience with their compelling words as well as their work to elevate women in media.

You Are Not Alone — or #QueridaFamilia — campaign, who were honored with the WMC Solidarity Award for their work mobilizing nearly 250 leaders in entertainment and other industries to express solidarity with members of the Latinx community in the wake of ICE raids, the El Paso shooting, and reports of migrant detention conditions. Actresses Eva Longoria and Diane Guerrero were joined on stage by co-organizers Alex Martinez Kondracke, Monica Ramirez, and Olga Segura. 

“The Latinx leaders in our community needed to respond with one voice and say, ‘We are not alone,’” Monica Ramirez said of the group’s decision to start the campaign. 

Eva Longoria called on those in the audience representing the media to continue to consciously work to tell diverse stories and represent the Latinx community in a positive light. “Love is actionable,” she concluded. 

Next, Women’s Media Center co-chair Pat Mitchell introduced the audience to the winner of the award named in her honor: Laura Flanders, host of The Laura Flanders Show. Flanders is well known as a journalist who has worked and continues to work hard to advance progressive and inclusive media by consistently including diverse voices and new ideas in her work. Like the namesake of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award, Flanders doesn’t report just on the problems we face, but also on solutions being put forward — and the people working to promote those solutions. 

“If there is an achievement ever in journalism, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s a shared achievement,” Flanders told the audience. “I share mine with anyone who has ever shared their story with me.”

WMC Catalyst Award honoree Lauren Embrey — an artist, activist, and philanthropist — has been a longtime champion of women in the media. From launching the WMC Name It. Change It. program to galvanizing an Obama White House summit on women and media, to championing the creation of the WMC Speech Project and WMC Media Lab, the president of the Embrey Family Foundation has a wealth of information on catalyzing female journalists, artists, and activists. 

Few women can claim to be as visible and powerful in the media as Gayle King, making her an apt recipient of the WMC Visible and Powerful Award. As co-host of CBS This Morning and editor-at-large at Oprah magazine, King has been as powerful in journalism as she has in advancing women’s and girls’ visibility, power, and diversity in the media. “If you want to be a woman in power,” she reminded the audience. “Then empower other women.”

Every year, the Women’s Media Center runs its renowned WMC Progressive Women’s Voices program, the alumnae of which have gone on to become powerhouse voices in the media. Zerlina Maxwell, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and Maysoon Zayid — the recipients of this year’s Progressive Women’s Voices Impact Award — are just three examples of outstanding graduates of the program who have gone on to do incredible work as, respectively, the senior director of progressive programming for Sirius XM, executive editor of Teen Vogue, and game-changing stand-up comedian and actress. 

“Sharing women’s stories, no matter how dark, tragic or painful — or joyful — has the power to fundamentally change the world around us,” Mukhopadhyay noted in her speech.

 “People with disabilities are 20 percent of the population, but we are only 2 percent of the images we see,” said Zayid. She’ll be at the forefront of changing that reality when she stars in an upcoming new comedy series on ABC about a woman with a visible disability.  

Digital activist Joy Buolamwini and Grazia Chiuri, creative director of Dior’s women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections, contributed to the media in different ways from other honorees. Buolamwini won the WMC Carol Jenkins Award for her work exposing race and gender bias in commercial artificial intelligence systems by exposing “the coded gaze” — a phrase she coined. Chiuri accepted the WMC Sisterhood Is Powerful Award for her work launching the recent “Sisterhood Is Powerful, Global and Forever” T-shirt collection for Dior. As women in male-dominated fields, both honorees proved not only the power of women bringing their life experiences and perspective to this work, but also the many ways in which women can positively impact the media beyond the power of the word or the use of a camera.

Finally, Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown took the stage to accept the WMC Investigative Journalism Award, in honor of her work reporting on the decades of sexual abuse and assault perpetrated by Jeffery Epstein. Brown continued to report on this story for years, even as other reporters dropped the story and after Epstein escaped punishment from the legal system.

“Jeffrey Epstein is a symptom of a larger problem in this country and the world,” Brown said of her work. “Now is the time for all of us women and men in the media to call all of these predators and their enablers into account.”

Women's Media Awards in pictures