I. Introduction This master’s thesis represents study of female newspaper and magazine editors in Azerbaijan based on Western and Soviet definitions of journalism with explanation of local national features of this p

I. Introduction
This master’s thesis represents study of female newspaper and magazine editors in Azerbaijan based on Western and Soviet definitions of journalism with explanation of local national features of this profession. The idea of conducting such research came right after completion of the 2008 research where we examined male editors-in-chief, deputy managing editors and department editors. Those journalism practitioners represented three age generations of Azerbaijani journalism: the old-school Soviet practitioners drilled to adhere party discipline; the war and crisis generation that experienced crash course in capitalism and learned to survive by all means and the youngest generation that came after economical stabilization of Azerbaijan after the year 2000.
However, the 2008 inquiry left an aftertaste of incompleteness since the research did not involve even a single female editor. The reason of course was, that women (with one exception¹) editors were not represented in that research since none of them were employed in the largest nationwide newspapers that were part of the research sample. Having in mind argumentation of Linda Steiner (Steiner, 1997) on masculine bias inside of journalistic community the 2008 research levitated reasonable questions: are there no female editors in Azerbaijan and if they really exist what is their position in the typological frame derived from the research of Azerbaijani male editors. Logically, the 2012 research had to take a similar approach to the inquiry, resulting in almost identical conceptualization and question apparatus, with the gender aspect being the key modification to the scheme.
Despite the attention that the gender problematic received starting the 1990s, surprisingly there were only two attempts to explore female segment of mass media in Azerbaijan. Presented thesis is the third attempt to map female journalists working in Azerbaijani media. The first was a bilingual book “Elegant signatures” published by the Azerbaijan Journalist Women Association attempted to provide comprehensive information about 141² female correspondents, editors and publishers that within the last century worked or currently work in Azerbaijani media. Even though the book claims to be of an encyclopedic value during our research we discovered that it omitted names of several editors that participated in our research even though some of them were in local newspapers for 41 years not to mention name of the first Azerbaijani “professional” woman journalist Safiga Afandizade.
The second endeavor was a joint survey of the International Journalist Federation and Azerbaijan Journalists Union aiming to map female journalist community and involving 200 journalist respondents. Data received after the first year of the two-year project were published in 2011 as a leaflet “Gender question in Azerbaijani media”. Much anticipated leaflet, however, limited itself to a brief description of gender legislature and general statement of well-known facts, that could be summed up in one sentence: “women’s representation in decision making bodies remains very low”. According to the publication women journalists constitute only 30-35 % of employees in countrywide distributed newspapers and 20-25 % of local newspapers while there are only 10 female editors in all the editorial-offices surveyed.
Disagreement over validity and generalizability of data collected by the two previous attempts and nonexistence of any other sources flagged a pressing need in a more serious academic effort to map landscape of female journalism in Azerbaijan. Simply put, current study of female journalism in our country is surrounded by unsystematic effort lacking consensus in methodology of conducting scientific inquiry. Among long-standing consequences of such state is enlarging knowledge gap that limits our understanding of current situation and thus prevents development of the whole media studies sector.
Our thesis, lacking necessary financial sponsorship, can be qualified as a first small effort to close that gap and present knowledge about important segment of female journalism – editors. The information provided in the course of this thesis may be of interest both to scholars and the general public since its aim is to reexamine and provide readable theoretic summary of academic thought on such concepts as journalistic profession, gatekeeping, deprofessionalization and proletarization, objectivity and instrumentalization of journalism as well as to endeavor application of all these products of Western media theory on post-Soviet reality of Azerbaijan. We cannot, due to the limited nature of this paper, account all possible and relevant fields of female journalism, however, we believe that this is a start and step by step we will be able to close the knowledge gap and advance to answering the grand question – why media in Azerbaijan are as they are?