Women at the Table: Female Guests and Experts in Current Affairs Television

ABSTRACT

While the topic has been on the agenda for decades, women continue to be underrepresented and represented in problematic ways in the media. In news and current affairs programs on TV, female guests and experts are still a minority while they are also often pigeonholed in gender-specific roles and addressed in gender-specific ways. Based on a qualitative analysis of 25 programs made by Flemish public service broadcaster VRT, we aimed to explore good practices as well as lingering problems in order to answer our first research question: How are female guests and experts represented in VRT current affairs programs? To support our analysis, we also conducted two focus group interviews with twelve gender experts, addressing the question: How do gender experts assess the representation of female guests and experts in VRT current affairs programs? Our findings show that many of the critiques identified by previous research are still valid, although we do see clear signs of improvement. However, female guests still constitute a minority, which particularly creates problems when they are part of a male dominated panel. Based on these findings, we formulate a number of recommendations to help journalists in developing more gender sensitivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender representation
• women
• television news
• expertise
• sources
• public service media

View correction statement:

Correction

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the VRT diversity team for supporting this research and the participants in the focus groups for sharing their insights with us.

Disclosure Statement

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

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/10.1080/17512786.2020.1816005)

Notes

1 In the original research, we also analyzed three episodes of human interest shows as well as 15 episodes of 5 radio shows, but for the sake of coherence and brevity these are not included in this article.

2 We showed two clips from De afspraak, and one each from Terzake, De markt and De zevende dag. A sixth clip, from a human interest show, was also shown but will not be discussed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by VRT, the Flemish public service media company, to support their diversity policies, but was executed independently in full academic freedom.