The Weeks That Were: Women in IT and Media 2024

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 29/12/2024

Moonshot News reports about IT and Media with a special focus on the situation for women: Generative artificial intelligence could be a stepping stone for women in IT. In the media, women also struggle to make a career as only 24% of top editors are women. Here are a few of the past year’s many news stories about women in IT and Media.

77.8% of women experience age based discrimination at work at some stage in their careers. Only 12.7% say they have not experienced ageism at all. “Ageism is an ever-present form of discrimination that workplaces can no longer afford to ignore. It is impacting women-identifying professionals across countries, organizations, industries, and sectors. And, the data reflects that there is no age or stage in a woman’s career where she’s immune to it”. 

Only 24% of the 174 top editors across 240 major online and offline news outlets are women despite that, on average, 40% of journalists are women. In 2023, this figure was 22% across the same markets, a survey by Reuters Institute shows. Among 33 new top editors appointed this year and last, 24% are women.

17% of international patents are held by women while men have 83% according to UN data. With the trends today, gender parity in international patenting will take until 2061, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) says. 

Half of women say their stress levels have increased since last year, and despite some progress, they are still not receiving adequate mental health support in the workplace, consultancy Deloitte’s annual survey Women at Work shows. Lack of flexible working hours is among the top reasons women have changed jobs over the past year (15%), with the same number also citing poor work/life balance. 

92 women journalists are behind bars, some for decades, others awaiting potential death sentences. 57 women journalists have been either detained, arrested, or imprisoned since the start of this year, a report from non-profit organisation Women in Journalism shows. “Our data provides a snapshot of the ongoing challenges faced by women in the media who are targeted for their journalistic endeavours.”

Gender parity will take another 134 years to reach. Underrepresentation of women in sectors with higher paying jobs, including technology and infrastructure, is one of the reasons for the gender pay gap. In 2024, women made up 28.2% of the STEM workforce, but the picture is improving for AI Engineering talent, World Economic Forum says in a report. 

The hiring of women into leadership roles continues to decline but GenAI presents an opportunity to help close the gender gap. Women are pushing forward with their own technical upskilling. Since 2016, the share of female AI talent and the concentration of women working in AI engineering has grown significantly, argues Sue Duke, head of global public policy at Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, in a blog post for World Economic Forum. 

There are fewer women having leading roles in top films! Last year fewer girls and women had leading roles compared to 2022. The figure plummeted to 30%, on par with 2010 and a 14 percentage point decline from the year prior, according to a study by the US-based Inclusion Initiative at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The findings for all speaking characters show that little has changed for girls/women on screen in more than a decade and a half. 

Femtech startups – companies focusing on women’s health products and services – are collectively on course to raise a record amount of venture capital this year. “Investor interest in the sector has steadily grown in recent years as recognition expands for women’s healthcare needs”, according to US-based financial data firm PitchBook.

The European Parliament says it stands for gender equality. However, the EU elections in June did not improve the Parliament’s gender equality but made it slightly worse. The share of women elected as MEPs at the European elections in June 2024 was 38.5%, down from 39.8% just before the elections, the Parliament’s data shows.

There is a growing interest in women’s sports as investment opportunities! Sports have become a highly sought after asset class for private equity firms, and the Paris Olympics—the first to feature an equal number of male and female athletes—placed a spotlight on women’s sports as investment opportunities, financial data firm PitchBook says in a report.

Close to 50% of gamers worldwide are women but the business is dominated by men! More than three billion people worldwide play digital games and 46% of them are women. Despite this diverse community of gamers, their reflection on screen is significantly lacking, US-based Geena Davis Institute on gender in media says. The institute has now published The GDI Playbook with ideas on how to get a better gender balance in gaming business.

YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms, according to a US fact sheet by Pew Research Center. On Facebook, the majority are women, 78% versus 61% men, while the gender balance on YouTube is a bit better but with a majority for men, 87% versus 83% for women. 

Women in the public eye, including journalists, those in politics and women human rights defenders are often targets of deliberate acts of violence, both online and offline, a new UN-report says. The report from the  UN Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women, was released on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. 

Artificial intelligence poses new risks in terms of cyberviolence against women. Women are the primary targets of deep-fakes, particularly of ‘nudification’. More than 90 % of all deep-fake videos online are pornographic in nature and their victims are almost exclusively women – often cultural, media and political personalities, says an EU briefing for the European parliament’s annual Gender Equality Week.