Raju Narisetti asks whether the new weekly women’s page in HT is ‘a liberated ghetto for women?’

Dustin Harp of the University of Texas in Austin has done an interesting look at women’s pages in the US and notes that “after nearly a century of publishing explicitly named women’s pages, US newspapers starting in 1969 and into the 1970s began renaming them ‘style’ or ‘lifestyle’ sections, theoretically meaning they were for a general audience. This research investigates industry discourse during this time to determine what those in newsrooms were thinking about this transition.

The intention behind a women’s page might be noble–cover more issues impacting core, clearly identified readers, aka women–but to make it a ghetto and not mainstream it across the newspaper is a step back. And, I really wonder would a Simply Men’s page have had the same Tip of the week for those who have “never logged on to the Internet (and) still wondering what the Web is all about.”