Andrea Mitchell says “a lot has been undone” for women in the news media.

NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, who accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center, said “a lot has been undone” for women in the news media, citing the situation in other countries as well as in the United States.

“Now we have top female managers in our news departments and women who are proving themselves every day in Ukraine,” Mitchell said in her speech to the group. “But there is still work to be done for women here and around the world, not only in China but also in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are taking announcers, judges and teachers back to the Middle Ages. In Iran, where women are beaten and jailed and some killed for challenging the regime, according to human rights defenders. Certainly none of us who came of age in the 1960s thought that a right the Supreme Court had held for nearly half a century could ever be taken away. She referred to the court’s decision last summer in which Roe vs. Wade was destroyed.

Mitchell also talked about first joining NBC News in 1978, along with her friend and mentor Judy Woodruff, who was about to retire as a PBS NewsHour anchor. Mitchell’s White House rivals included CBS News’ Lesley Stahl and NPR and ABC News’ Cokie Roberts.

“We were a group of sisters competing for exclusive awards, but on the campaign plane or Air Force One, husbands, children, boyfriends, elderly parents and a host of other challenges at home pitied us,” she said.

Of bosses at the time, she said, “There were always predators, but most of them were just paternalistic.”

She recalled that when she was NBC’s energy correspondent covering the Three Mile Island near meltdown in 1979, the bureau chief switched male correspondents to cover it “to avoid overexposure of anyone to radiation,” before we knew what the extent of the accident was. .”

She said she grew increasingly frustrated that she was the only one not allowed to cover the story that was on her partner, and finally confronted the bureau chief to ask him why.

“He said because I was old enough to raise children,” she said. “I thanked him for his concern but reassured him that men’s testicles are just as susceptible to radiation as women’s ovaries.”

“He sent me the next day and I stayed for months,” she said.

Mitchell, chief of foreign affairs and chief correspondent and moderator in Washington Andrea Mitchell reports on MSNBC, who also received their Founders Award from the International Center for Journalists last week.

Robin Roberts, Mariana Ardila Trujillo, Loretta J. Ross, Salamishah Tillet, Loreen Arbus and Maria Martinez were also honored.