Q&A: Going Behind the Camera with Kelly Bates

Photograph courtesy of ABC6.

She might have grown up over the border in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, but Kelly Bates is a Rhode Islander through and through. The Coventry resident was a reliable face on WJAR for seventeen years, where she became one of the state’s most recognizable weather personalities. After she and the station had a rocky parting in September 2021, she wondered whether she’d ever work in television again. One viral TikTok video and nine months later, she was back on the air at ABC6, where she started her Rhode Island weather career back in 2000.

A year-and-a-half into her new gig, Bates sat down with Rhode Island Monthly to reflect on the changes that led to where she is now and the outlook for women as they age in television (spoiler: not good). She’s also embraced her new status as a mentor and role model, supporting everyone from her devoted viewers to her transgender daughter.

It’s been a little over a year since you returned to ABC6. How’s it going?

It’s fun, because it’s exactly where I was. I was weekend nights, and here I am on weekend nights. But it’s interesting, because I have a different role this time. I get asked a lot of questions from the young people in the newsroom. It’s almost a mentoring role that I’ve stepped into now. And I love it. I see it as a way I can help these young people getting into this business that’s rapidly changing right now. I try to empower them. They want to do good work, but they don’t want to be taken advantage of, and I find that’s a fairly common thread with young people. People in their twenties, they see that there are jobs available, but they don’t want to work for nothing, and that is something that is happening. Nobody wants to pay them to work. So I’m trying to show them ways that they can approach things to maybe get a little more or stand up for themselves. Things I wish somebody had told me a long time ago.

What would you have told yourself at that age?

I would tell myself to absolutely stand up for yourself. To absolutely know your worth and never agree to the first offer. Because that’s the minimum they’re willing to pay you. And you’re not being a nice person by agreeing to that. You’re potentially setting yourself up to be pushed around. I thought being nice was worth more than being an advocate for yourself. But it’s not. I should’ve stood up for myself. And there is a way to do them both. There’s a way to be nice and genuine and still stand up for yourself, and I didn’t do that. I let myself get pushed around. A lot of it has to do with traditional gender roles, where I was the only girl in my class at college in meteorology.

When you left WJAR in 2021, your goodbye message to viewers got nearly 60,000 likes on TikTok. You were incredibly raw in your emotions, and I think it resonated with people.

Well, it was my life. Before I worked in the industry, I was part of this industry. And that came from my father. My father designed television stations from the equipment standpoint. We always had cameras, and I had a Betamax in my house, which was one of the first VCRs. My father had to know how everything worked because he drew up the schematics and flow charts and how things were to be wired up. There’s tape of me when I’m five standing outside my house going, ‘Today’s going to be hot, but a little chilly.’

Did you have support when you were a teenager in pursuing that career goal?

100 percent. My dad always got behind me. My dad was the driving force for everything. Even though there were no women doing this job, my dad used to say, ‘You can walk among kings.’ For a girl growing up hearing that, and knowing that your dad believes in you like that, I was very confident.

What was it like going on-air for the first time?

It was terrifying. It was utterly terrifying. It was ’96. I was twenty-four and a size six, and I would get calls saying, ‘The weather lady needs to wear a girdle.’ I am not kidding you. At the time, a lot of women were being brought on weather teams as almost a token thing, you know? I was on weekend mornings; it’s considered the lowest-rung show. It was a great station. I learned so much. The meteorology staff at WMUR [in Manchester, New Hampshire,] were second to none. Anytime you’re in an industry that involves performance, there’s going to be ego, but this weather team was exceptional. Mike Haddad, who is the chief there now — I learned most from him. I was there for four years.

What was the environment like at WJAR when you started back in 2004? When I was brought on, we were NBC O&O, and we had a female hierarchy for management. Female news director,
female general manager — extraordinarily rare. Even now, it’s extraordinarily rare. It was different from any place I’d ever worked. It set the footprints for me to follow in how I behave when I’m at work now. It was nice to finally have a woman who I could emulate — who I could
aspire to — and that was [former news director] Betty-Jo Cugini, who’s now Betty-Jo Greene, and she just won Citizen of the Year in Westerly.

You said when you left in 2021 that you didn’t expect to get another job in television. What was going through your head at the time?

I had a convergence of things [that year] that each required 100 percent of my time and attention. My daughter came out as trans in August. The month before, my dad was put in home hospice care, and I was his primary caregiver. He had end-stage liver disease. And then the end of August was when my contract was up, and we tried to put something agreeable together and it just didn’t happen. It all fell apart the first week of September.

I was still part time. I never got the promotion [back to full time], and it became very clear that I wasn’t going to be promoted. It just wasn’t going to happen. As a part-time employee, a large portion of my income was made up of filling in when people were on vacation or sick, and a lot of that time was being offered to full-time employees, so it got to the point that I couldn’t support my family anymore.

I had to take some power back because I felt so utterly defeated. So I took the initiative to control my own narrative. That’s my fancy way of saying I made a TikTok video. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to say goodbye as me to the 200 people who are following me.’ And it was real. It was authentic. It was everything I was feeling at the time, and I didn’t want to be a stupid cliché. But who was going to see it? I only had 200 followers. I just wanted to tell people thank you.

A lot of women were sharing stories in the comments about similar things that happened to them in their workplaces. How did it feel to get that surge of support?

It was extraordinarily humbling. It brought me to my knees. It was heartbreaking reading those. Their stories, these women who had it so much worse than I did but didn’t have the platform to be able to say what was happening to them. And it broke my heart that it had been going on for so long and not much had changed. That as women age, they’re being pushed out. I read a study in AARP that said women’s earning peaks at age thirty-eight. Men’s peaks at forty-eight. And that’s something I never thought. I always thought, ‘As I get older, I’m going to make more each year, and that will be it until I retire.’ No. That was the wakeup call.

You’ve said in the past that women rarely retire from television. Can you expand on that?

That’s true. It’s a system of being pushed out. And I think it’s as much an issue of upper management pushing women out as it is with [imposter syndrome]. A study cited in Forbes in March 2023 found that 75 percent of female executives across industries experienced imposter syndrome in their career. Seventy-five percent felt they didn’t have the right to be there. So maybe that led to self-sabotage or self-doubt, or led to them not feeling confident enough to stick it out or stick it through or know their worth. And chances are they were taken advantage of. I don’t want to blame my departure on the fact that I am an older female, but I would be naïve if I didn’t acknowledge that probably played a large part.

Do you feel like you’ve been able to make a difference for the women hearing your story?

I do. Part of the reason why that mindset, I think, was allowed to succeed was because a lot of women felt isolated. They felt if they talked to anyone that they were weak, or if you reach out for help you don’t know what you’re doing. And part of that goes back to the imposter syndrome: ‘Do I really know what I’m doing?’ But for women to reach out and share their stories, to realize you’re not alone, that’s huge. That’s so empowering. Knowing that it’s not just you. Knowing that you have the experiences of so many women who came before you and are going through it right now. That’s powerful stuff. It legitimizes your experience. It takes away any hint of gaslighting. The truth crystalizes when you see it through that lens.

You mentioned earlier that your daughter, Winter, came out as transgender in 2021. What has it been like supporting and mentoring her knowing that she’ll face unique challenges as a trans woman?

It’s tough. But I was well prepared from my father. My father always instilled, ‘Family is everything.’ The mindset that if anyone in your family needs you, you’re there. It doesn’t matter, you drop everything and you run. His family that he grew up with was the same way. It’s all about family. So I was prepared. She came out — ‘Yes, absolutely, no problem. Whatever your needs are, they will be met, 100 percent.’ And that’s my dad. Winter initially came out as gay in high school and then went to college on Prince Edward Island for the first two years through the Berklee extension program, and it was during the second year that she was up there that I got a text one day that said, ‘Um, I’m a girl.’ And I said, ‘I always wanted a daughter,’ which is true. And off we went.

Anything else you want to share with our readers?

I cannot put into words how grateful I am for the support. It’s overwhelming. And humbling. And I am very aware of how lucky I am. Even with all the hardships or the backslides that happened, to know that I have such an amazing network is humbling. It’s empowering. It gets me out of bed in the morning sometimes. It’s easier to face the challenges when you’re not alone. And that can go to anything. That can go to the people in the LGBTQ community. The people who are having trouble at work. The people who are being taken advantage of. It helps to know you’re not alone. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.