How are media organisation’s doing with diversity in management?
Women journalists are still under-represented in media top management. Only 23 per cent of the top editors across 200 major outlets in ten countries are women despite that, on average, 40 per cent of journalists in the markets are women. Every single of the ten markets has a majority of men among the top editors, including countries like Finland and Brazil where there are more women than men working as journalists, a study by the Reuters Institute at the Oxford University shows.
But there are variations: In Japan, none of the major news outlets in the study have a woman as top editor. In South Africa, 47 per cent of the top editors are women.
Countries like Germany and South Korea, that score well on the UN Gender Inequality Index, have very few women among the top editors, the Institute said.
The study includes Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom from Europe; South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea from Asia; Mexico and the United States from North America; and Brazil from South America.
TOP TEN MEDIA OF EACH MARKET
In each market, the Institute focused on the top ten offline (TV, print, and radio) and online news brands in terms of weekly usage. The focus on the most widely used offline and online brands means that some important outlets, in the UK for example the Financial Times and The Economist, both of which have female editors, were not included in the study.)
” Offline brands – generally older organisations with a longer legacy – more often have male top editors, whereas the share of women among the top editors of online brands across all ten markets is more than two and a half time higher. 14 per cent of top editors of offline brands are women and 37 per cent of top editors of online brands are women,” the study shows.
ONLINE MEDIA BRINGING STRONGER DIVERSITY
The authors of the report see this difference as perhaps a sign of positive development:
“Perhaps there are thus signs of progress? We will know more when we repeat this analysis in 2021 to track developments in gender equality among top editors across the world.”
“Top editorial positions in major news outlets matter both substantially and symbolically. Top editors make important decisions every day, which their personal experiences will, in part, sometimes influence. Top editors also represent their outlets, and collectively help represent the news media more broadly, and the diversity (or lack thereof) of top editors is thus symbolically important and likely to shape how news media are perceived by different parts of the public.”
“There is a notable variation in the number of people who get news from outlets with a female top editor. The share of online news consumers who say that they read news from at least one major outlet with a female top editor ranges from 77% in South Africa to 0% in Japan (that has no female top editor). Further, we find that 70% of those surveyed in Hong Kong – followed by 60% in Brazil and Finland – report reading news from at least one major outlet with a female top editor, while only 31% and 37 % do the same in the UK and Mexico respectively.
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