Bridging the Gender Inequality Gap in the Media

By Valentina Ieri Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 2015 (IPS) - Despite the vast number of media outlets and news sources worldwide, women and girls are still not getting enough attention in the news.

That is why the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the largest study on gender and media, launched a new fundraising campaign on March 5th to improve gender equality.

Every five years since 1995, the GMMP has picked a single day of the year to analyse global media coverage with respect to gender.

Through such analysis, GMMP has discovered great disparities between women and men in news coverage. The organization claims that “even though women make up more than half the world’s population, less than a quarter of what we see, hear or read in the media are the voices of women.”

GMMP’s investigations show that the ways women and men are represented in news stories highlights gender discrimination and stereotypes. The organisation brings its results directly to governments, and tries to persuade them to change policy.

The fundraising campaign invites people to contribute $10, and to invite 10 friends to do the same, in order to raise enough money to launch another monitoring day. It is organized through social media and calls on users to reach out to their friends and networks using Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

The idea of a one-day study of gender representation in the world’s news media was developed at the 1994 international conference “Women Empowering Communication”, in Bangkok. In 1995 volunteers from 71 countries monitored the news in newspapers, on television and radio, and collected over 50 000 media records.

GMMP continues to re-examine the selected indicators of gender in the news media, comparing female presence with male visibility, gender bias and stereotypes in news content.

On the last monitoring day, in 2010, results showed that only 24 per cent of news subjects on television are female. Men are usually portrayed as experts in their field. On the internet, 16 per cent of female news subjects were addressed as victims in contrast to 5 per cent of male news subjects.

GMMP involves grassroots organisations, university students, researchers and experts working on a voluntary basis.

GMMP explains that women and girls become second-class citizens when their concerns are not reflected in the news, saying that their activity “challenges media organizations and professional journalists to implement editorial policies that are fair, more balanced, and more gender friendly.”

The project is run by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), an international non-governmental organisation that promotes social justice.

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin