Women, Men and News

Abstract

In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men’s voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• Global Media Monitoring Project
• journalism
• media monitoring
• news
• qualitative analysis
• quantitative analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the volunteer monitoring teams for England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland who did a great job, and Tobias Bürger and Jane Wynn for their excellent work with the data.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

† To misquote Spock.

1 See https://www.facebook.com/WomensEqualityUK/ (accessed 14 April 2016).

2 A fuller account of the GMMP methodology, guidelines for coders and all coding instruments can be found at http://whomakesthenews.org/media-monitoring/methodology (accessed 20 April 2016).

3 The BBC’s Expert Women initiative was launched in 2013, but after an initial flurry of events across the United Kingdom does not seem to have been particularly active (http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/work-in-broadcast/events/expert-women) (accessed 20 April 2016).

4 The four news stories are Wilson (2015), Wootton and Pink (2015), Twomey (2015) and Holehouse (2015).

5 Between 2010 and 2015, the number of women MPs elected to the Westminster Parliament rose from 22 to 29 per cent (Keen 2015). In the 2010 GMMP, the overall presence of women in the politics and government category was 25 per cent: in 2015 it was 20 per cent.

6 See http://whomakesthenews.org (accessed 20 April 2016).

7 See http://thewomensroom.org.uk (accessed 20 April 2016).

8 “Brave New Girl”, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kgQADIHVSA (accessed 20 April 2016).