In many ways, television today is about women more than men.
More women watch television than men; female producers and writers have had huge success in prime time and daytime; and in January, women will occupy two of the three seats as anchors of network evening newscasts.
But there is one glaring exception: Very few women make it inside the writing rooms for late-night television hosts, despite that women make up a larger proportion of their audience than men.
There are no female writers on the new The Jay Leno Show, Late Show with David Letterman or The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien.
The lack of women in late-night writing positions was pushed again to the forefront by David Letterman's confession of sexual relationships with his staff members.
In the 1980s, Letterman pioneered the kind of college-age male humor that dominates late night. But now, his audience is almost 55 percent women. Leno's is more than 53 percent, and O'Brien's just over one-half. Yet the writing room and sensibilities of the show itself remain largely male.
Steve Bodow, the head writer for The Daily Show, conceded that the preponderance of male writers had not changed much in recent years, although his show hired two women writers in September.
In what seems like a paradox, The Daily Show was in fact created by two women, Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg, in 1996 for Comedy Central. And one of the most influential writers in the history of late night is Merrill Markoe, Letterman's previous longtime girlfriend who was also his full partner in the invention of his late-night show in the 1980s.
Those women acknowledged that recruiting and hiring female writers was a daunting challenge for them at the time. Markoe said she believed what she called "an odd shift toward more boys' humor" in the 1990s might have kept some women from landing late-night jobs.
Winstead scoffed at the idea that a strong woman writer would be offended by the writers' room. "I have no sensitivity to off-color humor," she said. "I only have a sensitivity to bad humor."
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