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Women: International
‘Who Makes the News?’
The Global Media Monitoring Project 2000 finds great disparities in
news coverage of men and women.
By Teresita Hermano and Anna Turley
When we look at news coverage
through the prism of gender,
what we discover ought to
startle those who think women’s perspectives
and issues are being well represented.
Even though the number of
women journalists is increasing, when
it comes to coverage by news organizations
women’s visibility is much more
limited.
In two separate investigations—
separated by five years—the Global
Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) provided
just this kind of information.
“Women’s Participation in the News,”
an examination of the day’s news on
January 18, 1995 in 71 countries, revealed
that women were the subject of
news reports on radio, television and
newspapers just 17 percent of the time.
[That left men’s visibility at 83 percent.]
Five years later, after a period
spanning a myriad of women’s campaigns,
including the massive World
Conference on Women in Beijing and
the post-Beijing activities, a more indepth
Global Media Monitoring Project
took place on February 1, 2000 in 70
countries. The main findings, published
in “Who Makes the News?” had hardly
changed. Women in the world’s media
that day were found to be just 18 percent
of the news subjects. These findings
emerged at a time when women
made up 41 percent of announcers
and reporters of the news.
GMMP 2000 was the work of the
World Association for Christian Communication
(WACC) Women and Media
Programme. For more than a decade,
the WACC Women’s Programme
has been organizing and supporting
workshops and conferences, including
the international conference on
“Women Empowering Communication,”
held in Bangkok and attended by
430 media and gender activists in 1994.
One of the main recommendations of
the Bangkok Declaration was the undertaking
of a global media monitoring
study. The 1995 effort, coordinated
by MediaWatch Canada, and the 2000
effort, organized by WACC, are considered
the most extensive analysis of
women’s presence and participation
in the world’s media.
WACC was determined that the
broad aims of the GMMP 2000 would
be to strengthen solidarity among
women in the media, media literacy,
and advocacy on media and gender
issues. The work in 1995 had already
helped to demystify this kind of research
by providing a worldwide network
of monitors with the opportunity
and tools to assess gender representation
in the media. By 2000, we were
able to see not only what changes had
taken place after five years and research
new questions but to extend the
use of our findings. We could offer
various monitoring groups contextual
analysis, including results from their
own country and region, which they
could use in their education and advocacy
work.
Employment Practices and
the Presence of Women
Journalists in the News
Media
During the last 40 years there have
been immense changes in women’s
participation in the news media. In the
1960’s and 1970’s, it was a rare event to
see women anchoring television newscasts,
yet today women make up a
slight majority of television news announcers
(56 percent), according to
data from GMMP 2000. There have
been less dramatic increases in
women’s participation as reporters—a
large majority (69 percent) of reporters
are still male.
The increasing presence of women
in television news media is undoubtedly
an important advance, yet even a
cursory look at employment practices
in the news media reveals a less rosy
picture. At WACC’s regional conferences
on Gender and Communication
Policy—held in Asia, Africa, the Middle
East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and
the Pacific between 1997-2000, many
women journalists revealed that their
appearance rather than their intellectual
abilities or experience is frequently
used as part of the criteria for their
selection. This evidence is supported
by GMMP 2000, which showed that
although there are more women news
presenters on television, they tend to
disappear from the screen at an earlier
age than their male colleagues do. From
Asia to Africa and the Middle East, participants
at the WACC conferences also
confirmed that while women are more
present in the newsroom, they continue
to be victims of harassment and
discrimination.
News Reporting and the
Gender Division of Labor
What news do men and women report?
Research has shown that there is
a clear gender division of labor in news
reporting, and this finding was confirmed
by GMMP 2000. Women journalists
are often confined to reporting
local news rather than national or foreign
news and “soft” topics such as
entertainment or health more often
than politics or crime. This gender segregation
of labor, in addition to the
relative values attached to “hard” and
“soft” news, mean that while women
78 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001