In feminist media studies, the growing body of research on media production has indicated that journalism remains divided along gender lines. The purpose of this study is to address the lack of relevant multi-method research on gender inequality in journalism. To assess the structural position of women in the journalistic workforce, the authors conducted a large-scale survey of journalists in Belgium. The survey results were explored in more depth by conducting qualitative interviews with 19 female journalists. The analysis confirms the existence of all traditional barriers that women journalists experience. The added value of this study is that it enumerates several additional difficulties, and offers insight into the strategies that the respondents use to deal with gender-related career obstacles. These strategies were associated with the degree of flexibility in the newsroom for journalists with children, the choice to work part-time or freelance, and the use of new communication technologies.

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Narratives on ageing are deeply entangled with discourses on happiness. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness to explore how happiness scripts make certain ‘happy objects’ such as beauty aspirations, sexual desires, and life choices seen as ‘right’ for older women and others as ‘wrong’. My aim is to contribute to new feminist theorisations of women’s ageing by exploring the unhappy archives of older women and looking for ways in which normative happiness scripts are challenged, destabilised and rewritten. Articulations of resistance are found through interpretative engagement with representations of older women who feel alienated by the ‘right’ happy objects, deliberately make ‘wrong’ object choices or turn the ‘right’ happy objects into tools to dismantle ageist, sexist and heteronormative structures. These resistance strategies come together in my theorising of the grumpy old women as affect alien and a patchwork of unruliness.