A 20-year stocktake of Aotearoa New Zealand’s performance in the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP): Feminisation of the newsroom but still not gender parity

ABSTRACT

Aotearoa New Zealand is often portrayed as a leader in gender equity, with the recent ascendance of Jacinda Ardern to Prime Minister reinforcing that image in the national and international media. However, 20 years of national data from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) show that gender imbalances continue in most aspects of the news sector, particularly in sports reporting. While the gender balance in New Zealand’s journalistic workforce has improved, this shift has not resulted in nearly such impressive gains in terms of sources and subjects in news stories. Drawing on other research to extend the insights provided by the GMMP findings, we suggest that young women are readily recruited into journalism but their pay, influence and hopes of promotion remain limited. We conclude by arguing that NZ has made substantial progress towards gender equity but much more can be done.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• women journalists
• media
• political news
• sports news
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Dr Chris Rudd and Rachel Billington from Otago University for their contribution to the GMMP 2020, particularly the sourcing and coding of the Otago Daily Times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Fountaine

The authors are all associated with the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University, where they share research and teaching interests around media and gender. They contributed to the New Zealand coding for the Global Media Monitoring Project in 2020.