Diane Sawyer Named World News Anchor: Network Glass Ceiling Gives Way to 2 Women Anchors

Sept. 3, 2009— -- The rarefied club of network evening news anchors will soon have an unprecedented majority: women.

As announced by ABC News Wednesday, "Good Morning America" anchor Diane Sawyer will succeed Charles Gibson, who is retiring from his post as anchor of "World News."

Sawyer's move to the "World News" desk in January will come more than two years after former NBC "Today Show" anchor Katie Couric took the helm at "CBS Evening News," succeeding Bob Schieffer.

Critics say the new female majority represents a great step forward in an industry and a media culture known for its boys club mentality. Women who managed to break the glass ceiling in television news decades ago were relegated to "soft" news stories on recipes and social events. As recently as 2007, when Couric was tapped for the CBS post, questions persisted about whether a woman could carry a major evening broadcast by herself.

"Historically, it's been a male-dominated world and women were judged much more on their looks and their age and their so-called lack of authority," said Ken Auletta, a media critic for New Yorker magazine.

"Katie and Diane and people like Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" -- these are all serious folks," he said. "The hope is you get to a world where it's not just pundits and not just the executives above them but also the viewers come to judge male or female [anchors] based on the job they do rather than their sex."

The first two women to lead network evening news broadcasts were teamed with men and the arrangements were short-lived: In 1976, ABC's Barbara Walters joined Harry Reasoner behind the desk for the network's broadcast and stayed there for two years. Her tenure was marked by open hostility from Reasoner and others at the broadcast, Walters would later say.

It took more than a decade-and-a-half for a woman to return to a network news anchor position -- in 1993, Connie Chung shared anchoring duties with CBS's Dan Rather. She, too, held the post for two years.

In 2005, Elizabeth Vargas became the first woman since Chung to anchor an evening newscast in the United States when she co-anchored "World News" for a spell with Bob Woodruff after Peter Jennings' death.

"What is so gratifying is that these women are holding their jobs by themselves," Chung said of Sawyer and Couric. "They don't have to share the seat with a man to convey credibility or to assure those who lived in the dinosaur years and continue to live among dinosaurs that we women can carry the ball solo."