36% of Nordic media CEOs are women
Of the 25 biggest Nordic media companies, nine have a woman as CEO. All six public service broadcast companies are run by a female CEO. A majority of boards have gender balance, with 17 of the 25 companies having a gender-balanced board defined as minimum 40/60, a study by media analyst Ulrika Facht at Nordicom, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows.
There are no improvements of gender balance in company boards nor in top management teams compared with a previous study in 2023.
The latest media gender balance study by Reuters Institute, published in the spring last year, shows that only 27% of the 171 top editors across 240 online news brands are women despite that, on average, 40% of journalists in the 12 markets studied are women. This is a small increase from 2024, when the figure was 24% across the same markets.
In ten countries investigated for six years, the percentage of women among the top editors has changed from 23% in 2020 to 28% in 2025.
In all 12 markets, the majority of top editors were men, including in countries where women outnumber men among working journalists.
“Research shows the significance of gender balance in company boards and top management on companies’ strategies and values, in addition to the fact that it fosters gender balance further down the hierarchy”, the new study from Nordicom says.
“This study of the 25 largest Nordic media companies confirms that gender balance begins at the top and spreads downwards. The results are in line with a comparable study made in 2023.”
The boards of the 25 media companies consisted of a minimum of five members and a maximum of ten, with a median of eight. The smaller the board, the more it affects the percentage of women members.
In the 25 companies, the percentage of women board members ranged from 0 to 56 per cent.
The highest percentage of women (56%) was found on the board of the public service company Sveriges Radio (SR) in Sweden. All six Nordic national public service companies on the top-25 list have gender balance on their boards.
One of the eight boards that had not achieved gender balance had no female representation at all: Danish newspaper company JFM.
“The fact that no Norwegian companies were found among those with less than 40 per cent women (or men) on the board can be linked to the fact that Norway has a law for gender balance on the boards of publicly listed companies.”
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