Gender equality gap in traditional news media will take 67+ years to close
It will take at least another 67 years to close the gender equality gap in traditional news media worldwide, according to the 6th Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the largest research and advocacy initiative in the world on gender equality in news and journalism.
GMMP has been run by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) every five years since 1995, examining the presence, representation and voice of women and men in the news. Its 6th report shockingly shows that – at the current pace – it will take until 2087 to close the gender equality gap.
Women made up 40% of reporters and 25% of news sources across print, TV, radio, internet news and Twitter; a record result for women as both news workers and sources, but still well short of equality, the report notes.
All things remaining equal, it will take at least a further 67 years to close the average gender equality gap in traditional news media.
More women reporters globally
Digging into GMMP’s findings, there are some quantitative gains but also some qualitative losses. Between 2015 and 2020, the needle edged one point forward to 25% in the proportion of subjects and sources who are women. This improvement is the first recorded since 2010 and is most visible in broadcast news media.
The proportion of women as subjects and sources in digital news stories increased one point overall, with a three-point improvement on news websites and a three-point decline in news media tweets.
Also, after a decade of stagnation, there has been an overall improvement in the number of stories in traditional news media (newspapers, TV and radio) that are reported by women, to 40% up from 37% in 2015.
Gains in women’s presence as authoritative sources
Women’s voices as expert sources were also up 7% from just five years ago, and women’s voices as spokespersons were up 8%. Currently, 24% of expert voices in the news are women, a big rise from 19% five years ago, according to the report.
However, women were also still less likely to be quoted as experts or commentators, the report found. News websites (23%) and newspapers (24%) had the lowest percentage of experts in the news who are women.
Specifically in stories about the Covid-19 pandemic, women were 27% of the doctors and health specialists that appeared, which the report said was “far fewer” than the 46% world average according to labour force statistics.
“For the past year, the majority of the global news coverage has been dominated by COVID-19, yet the data shows us that women’s voices have been yet again largely absent from the conversation. When women are on average 46% of health specialists in reality, but appeared as such in just 27% of coronavirus stories, inaccurate gender stereotypes are reinforced,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.
When women are on average 46% of health specialists in reality, but appeared as such in just 27% of coronavirus stories, inaccurate gender stereotypes are reinforced.
Women still more likely to report the news than to appear in it
The latest GMMP findings show a loss in the quality of news stories from a gender perspective.
Patterns of stagnation and decline are consistent across the GMMP news measures. For example, news stories are as unlikely to clearly challenge gender stereotypes today as they were 15 years ago.
After #MeToo, stories on gender-based violence hardly make the major news of the day and in the 1% of times that they do, women and girls are severely underrepresented, the report found. Fewer than half of gender-specific stories actually highlight gender (in)equality issues.
“At a time when a ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence against women and girls raged around the world, the fact that only 6 out of 100 stories were related to sexual harassment, rape and sexual assault against women risks normalizing gender-based violence,” said Mlambo-Ngcuka.
Women more invisible in influential international media
Another worrying finding is that women’s invisibility remains even more marked in influential international media that serve formidable audiences.
Women were only 13% of subjects and sources in the television newscast monitored and 21% in the digital news stories and tweets coded from Al Jazeera, BBC News-World, CNN International, France 24, Reuters, RT News, TeleSur and New York Times. In 2015, women were 15% of the people seen, heard, or read about in transnational digital outlets.
About the GMMP
The GMMP is coordinated by WACC, a global NGO that promotes communication rights for social justice. The GMMP is a collaborative effort of various women’s rights organizations, grassroots groups, media associations, faith-based / interfaith organizations, university students and researchers around the world. UN Women, the lead United Nations entity on gender equality, has supported GMMP thrice consecutively since 2010.
GMMP 2020 was implemented in 116 countries and covered 30,172 stories published in newspapers, broadcast on radio and television, and disseminated on news websites and via news media tweets.
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