Liberal ‘Russia expert’ calls Moscow media pool a ‘boys' club’. Female journalists beg to differ.

https://www.rt.com/news/460754-ioffe-female-journalists-boys-club/

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Julia Ioffe, liberal GQ correspondent and popular “expert on Russia” has lamented the absence of women in the ‘boys’ club’ of foreign media in Russia. The response was like a who’s who of foreign women journalists in Moscow.

Soviet-born Ioffe, whose family moved to the US in 1990, is a frequent critic of the Russian government and of US President Donald Trump, as well as being a fighter for LGBT rights and female empowerment.

Her fellow Russia-focused journalists must have been all the more baffled when she tweeted that ‘the Moscow foreign correspondents’ pool has become a boys’ club’, aside from the Washington Post’s Amie Ferris-Rotman and AP’s Natalya Vasilyeva.

Members of several outlets’ teams rushed to set the record straight.

As she was making the point that important woman-centered stories happening in Russia go under-reported in the West, Ioffe managed to overlook the existence of female journalists (“live women with vaginas”, as the LA Times’ Sabra Ayres put it, for added clarity) in the Moscow offices of: the BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, LA Times, ZEIT and the New York Times (which she specifically described as “all-male”).

Those are just the ones pointed out to her by the commenters – sharing not only Ioffe's profession, but also her liberal ideological lean. With a comet tail of ‘Russia expert’ appearances on mainstream media, bylines in numerous publications and an announced ‘book about Russian women’ coming out in 2020, one could be forgiven for expecting Ioffe to know the field.

She has been called ‘condescending’ before – though it was on Fox News and by a man, so it probably doesn’t count.

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