Katie Couric Shares Why She Believes 'Sexism Is Still One of the Most Acceptable -Isms'

In 2006, Katie Couric announced that she was leaving the Today Show and the comfort of the morning news cycle for a different challenge in her career. She headed over to CBS News where she took on the evening news anchor and managing editor role. She thought the world was ready for a female anchor, but it turns out that she faced an inordinate amount of sexism.

When Couric took the job, she thought the U.S. was much further along with women in the workplace, but she discovered rather quickly that she was never really accepted the way other male anchors were. “I think sexism is still one of the most acceptable -isms,” Couric said on her Katie Couric Media podcast, Next Question, with guest Brooke Shields. “But less so than it used to be.” In her five years with the network, she found herself on the receiving end of some unfair feedback.

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“I was criticized for what I wore my first night on the evening news. I got criticized for the way I held my hands. These really dopey things that a male anchor would never be subjected to,” she explained. Couric defended the people who had her back while she was at CBS, but she noted, “A lot of people didn’t like outsiders. It’s a pretty insular place. People go there and kind of spend their entire careers there.”

The journalist felt branded with the “outsider status,” “the first-woman status” and the “morning show albatross around my neck that somehow I lack gravitas.” Couric joked that the word “gravitas” is “Latin for testicles.” She was stuck with the label that she “wasn’t enough of a serious journalist to handle the CBS Evening News” which she called “baloney.” As a result, she felt that “there were a lot of biases that infected or affected the way people saw me in that role.”

Couric was “really, really proud” of her work on the Today Show, having interviewed presidents, world leaders, and Supreme Court justices during her time there, but the CBS workplace sexism didn’t allow her to shake her morning show host past at NBC. She left her position at CBS News at the end of her contract in 2011 because it wasn’t the right place for her to spread her wings.

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