More men than women in the news – but there are tools to balance it

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 04/07/2021

Media in general has a gender content gap meaning there are more men than women in the news reports. This lack of balance has been shown by many studies. Swiss publisher Ringier Group has introduced artificial intelligence-based tool EqualVoice that now is used by an increasing number of publishers trying to fix the disbalance.

The EqualVoice aims to measure the balance women-men in the news more or less in the same way as the BBC’s 50:50 tool, first introduced in 2017 and used by media companies globally.

The importance of better gender balance in the news is stressed by WAN-IFRA saying the media industry has played a direct role in perpetuating inequality by excluding women’s voices, stories and opinions in content and using language which stereotypes women.

“Readers are increasingly calling out news organisations for this practice, which, in failing to change, risk alienating their audiences, harming their corporate reputations and brands, and negatively impacting their bottom lines.”

An argument from WAN-IFRA is that women are more likely to read content in which they see themselves reflected, and yet they are only seen, heard or read on average 25% of the time.

And as the organisation says, especially now, when we are relying on the media to tell us the facts about our health and safety – perhaps more than ever! – it is important that every voice is represented.”

When the Ringier Group launched its EqualVoice Tool it stressed as a background that 75% of all Swiss media reports are about men.

“According to the Global Media Monitoring Project 2016, the global figure is as high as 82%. Little has changed over the past three years.”

“This raises questions: are there no women worth reporting on? Do men make for better headlines? Or is the skewed media portrayal simply a mirror of the labour market, where women are still under-represented in the boardrooms”, Ringier asked.

EQUAL VOICE

The Ringier Semantic Engine analyses the citation of women and men in articles, and an automatic image recognition tool helps in analysing pictures for the same. Ringier’s Equal Voice Tool is a semantic algorithm developed in-house. The EqualVoice factor measures the visibility of women in articles and comprises two objective indicators:

• the «Teaser Score», which evaluates the visibility of women in images, headlines and titles, and
• the «Body Score», which shows how often women and men are mentioned in an article’s text.

The company has also developed an EqualVoice Experts List as a search tool for journalists looking for a balanced mix of specialists to interview.

“The main goals of EqualVoice are to give women and men equal representation and to raise awareness of how the genders are portrayed in the media”, Ringier says.

“The real-time measurement of the EqualVoice factor is a tool for achieving these goals: it shifts the discussion from subjective perceptions of gender equality in publications to a factual basis. This serves as a foundation for developing solutions to the problem of equal representation in the media.”

“Our technological and journalistic heft enable the EqualVoice initiative to make an important and credible contribution to increasing diversity”, says Marc Walder, CEO of the Ringier Group.

The EqualVoice initiative began in Switzerland in November 2019 and it has also been made available as a service to other media companies.

Since March, the EqualVoice factor has also been measured in Ringier Axel Springer Poland’s 13 publications and other brands such as Business Insider, Newsweek and Forbes Women.

“I am delighted that we are now offering EqualVoice as a service, enabling us to work together on the goal of achieving equal representation of women and men”, says Annabella Bassler, CFO of Ringier and founder of the initiative.

BBC 50:50

The BBC project called 50:50 has increased women representation in BBC content with nine percentage points in a year, the broadcaster has announced.

Since launch when the BBC invited other companies to join the project, more than 75 organisations across 22 countries have started using the 50:50-program to reach gender balance.

Between June and November last year, the BBC took 2 563 snapshots of gender balance in programs, online content, events etc, with 1 219 (48%) reaching 50% women contributors. During the same period in 2019, 2 528 snapshots showed 988 (39%) reached the 50% – a nine percentage point increase on the same period in the previous year.

We’ve made control a core principle of the BBC’s 50:50 Project, which uses data to increase the number of women contributors on content. Control in this context means a journalist or content-maker’s ability to choose the people they include in their article, TV, or radio news piece, wrote Nina Goswami, BBC’s Creative Diversity Lead, presenting the project.

“This is what 50:50 concentrates on. It looks to create change by identifying the voices that are in the power of the journalist and content-maker to influence, and it is working to increase women’s representation at the BBC.”

BBC News presenter Ros Atkins, who started 50:50 in 2017, said “the golden rule of 50:50 is that the best contributor always takes part. It is not a quota system. Rather, it is an opportunity to identify where representation may be lacking and then for content-makers to go out and see if they can find new voices to enrich their content, while improving the output’s gender balance.”

More than 650 teams across the BBC take part in 50:50, not just the news, but also sports, factual and entertainment. To support their search there is also a central expert database with more than 1 500 women contributors available to the content teams which is a similar idea as the expert list developed by Ringier.

BBC has made a survey of 2 000 BBC online users to study the effects and it showed that 39% had noticed a shift toward more women contributors and 32% of women aged 25 to 34 are now consuming more content as a result.