Tai Nalon was 28 when she and two colleagues founded Aos Fatos. Back then, in 2015, few people took her idea of creating and leading a fact-checking organization seriously.
Ten years ago, independent and impactful journalism led by women was not common in Brazil. And few people believed in her initiative, she said.
“It’s difficult, it’s challenging. People will silence you and discredit you,” Nalon told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “They will continue to listen only to men if the spaces of power continue to be occupied only by men. This is real, but it has improved compared to what it was before.”
But now, women are a driving force behind digital journalism in Brazil. Of 164 digital native media outlets in the country, more than 80 percent have at least one woman on their founding team, and 44% were founded exclusively by women, according to a study of data from the Oasis Project carried out by SembraMedia and the Digital Journalism Association (Ajor in Portuguese).
Still, women leaders of news organizations in Brazil say they have overcome insecurities, machismo and leadership models created by men to find their own team management styles. They also emphasize the importance of creating and maintaining spaces for exchange with other women leaders in journalism.
Maria Vitória Ramos, co-founder and executive director of Fiquem Sabendo, was 21 when she and three colleagues started the journalism agency that specializes in public data.
She said that, at first, she didn't feel so welcomed by other women who were already in leadership roles. That changed over the years, and some women “went out of their way to help me, mentor me, make me believe in myself,” she said during a panel on the challenges for women journalism managers at the 19th International Conference of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji).
Bianca Pedrina, Elaine Silva, Marcela Leal and Maria Vitória Ramos during a panel at the 19th Conference of Abraji, on July 13, 2024. (Photo: Emily Cassiano / Abraji)
Ramos said that at first she felt some discomfort in calling herself a co-founder or director of her organization, and it was with the support of other women that she was able to take ownership of the role she occupies.
“In the first year and a half of Fiquem Sabendo, I didn’t say that I was a co-founder and director. There were other women who told me: ‘you are a director of your organization and you need to present yourself in this way.’ I wouldn't have the courage to do it alone. It is very important for us to lend each other this confidence,” Ramos said.
Juliana Mori, co-founder and editorial director of InfoAmazonia, also had to deal with her insecurities and other people's questions when leading teams at the beginning of her career.
“Women are put to the test much more than men,” Mori told LJR. “Maybe that’s why we take things much more seriously and prepare much more, while men can go into their roles more calmly, because they don’t deal with this doubt in advance about everything they’re going to do.”
Mori co-founded InfoAmazonia with journalist Gustavo Faleiros in 2012, and said that it was in previous experiences, in other work spaces, that she felt her leadership was delegitimized. She attributes this not only to machismo, but also to the fact that she was very young. In that context, she said, “it made me nervous and destabilized me.”
Today, with more experience, she said she doesn't think much about this issue.
“If I keep thinking that there is someone who doesn't think I'm being a legitimate leader or who doesn't think what I'm saying is reasonable because I'm a woman, I think that would be too paralyzing. So I end up not considering it much,” Mori said.
The experience also showed her that she does not need to adapt to a pre-established leadership mold.
“My way is the same, in life and in leadership. I'm not a person who comes and imposes and says I know everything. I think we are learning how we want to have these relationships, and the people who stay by our side are the ones who can deal with it,” she said.
Mori recommended that young leaders “take a deep breath, pay less attention to other people’s views and believe in their ability to be there.” She also advised them not to try to “assert themselves in a masculine way.”
“The people you work with will learn to respect you the way you are, with your characteristics perhaps much less authoritarian than the masculine ones they are used to, when your work is well done, it works and you create a relationship of trust and exchange with your team,” Mori said.
During the Abraji panel, Elaine Silva, managing partner of journalism agency Alma Preta, introduced herself by listing the roles she fills.
In addition to Alma Preta, she also works as a financial mentor for journalism organizations and is part of the federal government's National Council for the Promotion of Racial Equality.
“In addition to all these things, I am a mother. My son makes me get up every day and do all the things I do,” Silva said.
She said she highlights the importance of motherhood in her life to remember that people in leadership positions are human and cannot handle everything.
“How can we work while ignoring the emotional issues and invisible work that we do and that we are not able to complete because we want to be successful professionals? I don't want to be a successful professional. I want to be my son's mother. If I am his mother, I will automatically influence other women, because I will not stop being me,” Silva said.
For Bianca Pedrina, co-founder and executive director of Nós, mulheres da periferia, the greatest difficulty for women in spaces of power is finding their own way of being a leader, without sacrificing themselves to adapt to leadership formats that do not correspond to who they are.
“How do we respect ourselves and take care not to stop being who we are? We see many women in leadership positions who are depressed, anxious, experiencing burnout, and we need to talk about this,” Pedrina said during the Abraji panel. “It is important to occupy these spaces, but we need to understand that it is not by replicating male models that we will achieve this. We have a very rich opportunity to do it in a way where we respect and care for ourselves more.”
Natália Leal, executive director at fact-checking agency Lupa, said that one of the things she wishes she had been told is the importance of strengthening herself, both by surrounding herself with people she trusts and by going to therapy to understand herself and feel confident in leadership.
“Men claim places that they do not have the legitimacy to occupy all the time,” Leal said during the Abraji panel.
She highlighted that women, in general, need to feel very confident about what they are doing to be able to claim the positions they occupy, and that is why she encouraged them to study and dedicate themselves to mastering the subjects they work with.
“If you don't feel confident about something and someone disagrees with you, you're already going to put yourself in a very bad place of insecurity. It’s a development of studying and having your own strength and knowing things. And when you master subjects, you learn to delegate, because you learn to identify in other people what you need to feel confident with the fact that they will make decisions,” Leal said.
Pedrina co-founded Nós, mulheres da periferia with five other women journalists in 2014.
“We learn a lot from each other, because we are very complementary. We tried to find a way to always reach a consensus, but we understand that this is not always possible and we each started to take care of our own area and trust that the others would do the same. Dealing with the pain of growing up means having to make decisions, leading people and having to distance what it means to be a director a little from what it means to be a friend,” Pedrina said during the Abraji panel.
Nalon, from Aos Fatos, was part of the founding board of Ajor, between 2021 and 2023, and said that this was a space for many exchanges between women leaders in Brazilian digital journalism. They discussed the importance of fostering new leadership and how the presence of women at the head of organizations set Ajor apart from other associations of Brazilian journalistic entities, she said.
Furthermore, according to Nalon, there is a “permanent project” among some women directors of journalistic organizations to create an entity representing women managers in journalism. The idea has not yet been put into practice precisely because many of these women are overworked.
“This conversation always comes and doesn't move forward precisely because we are women and are overworked in our roles. It is up to us to do it, as always, and we lack support and a slightly more robust structure – including in our organizations – to support us and free us from certain functions and that give us the ability to create new leadership, provide mentoring, and everything else. I think that in Brazilian journalism this still does not exist in a structured way, as it should.”
