[ad_1]
NEW YORK – A new study on the representation of women in the media says news outlets should do more to include female perspectives.
The first step in achieving such fairness is for journalists to recognize that there is an imbalance in newsrooms and news production, Luba Kassova, author of the report, told VOA.
The report “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News” – commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – focused on India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Great Britain and the United States. It looked at four indicators: workplace diversity, editorial leadership, women as sources and figures in the news, and coverage of gender equality issues.
Overall, marginal progress has been made in the past 10 years, the report found. Challenge policy makers and editorial leadership to double female representation in the coming years to present more balanced perspectives on the issues.
When it comes to workplace diversity, “there are no success stories” in any of the countries surveyed, Kassova, who is director of AKAS, said at a news conference Tuesday. AKAS is an international public strategy group charged with carrying out the study.
Top positions in the newsroom remain largely a men’s reservation, and the absence of female voices in the decision-making process means that news about women and for women is mostly decided by men, Kassova said.
The world “is losing the perspective of half its population,” Pamella Makotsi Sittoni, executive director of Kenya’s Daily Nation, told VOA.
Women will continue to be denied the right to be heard or to assume leadership or influential positions in the media if the imbalance persists, Makotsi Sittoni said.
“There is an opportunity when you have equality to exploit on both sides and to exploit from both perspectives, and that is what we are missing out on by excluding women,” said the Kenyan journalist.
The study found an imbalance in the news-gathering process, which continues to favor male voices. Between 2005 and 2015, “fewer than one in five global news experts were women,” and today, the report said, men are cited in online news five times more often than women in Nigeria and six times in India.
The report analyzed news content and academic articles to create a database and used Google trends and surveys to collect data across the six countries. More than 2,000 articles and three case studies were considered, and the content of nearly 12,000 publications and more than 56 million stories were analyzed.
Researchers found that women have the best coverage in lifestyle stories, where their voices are captured more than in news related to decision making or current affairs.
Similarly, of the 19 beats analyzed, the lifestyle report was the point where female journalists have the most equality. Women tend to have coverage in education, the environment, and poverty and development issues, with fewer assignments to investigative reports, business or politics within newsrooms, the study found.
When it comes to expert sources cited in political coverage, men’s voices were up to seven times more likely to be heard than women’s. This is further reduced to economic issues where male experts were up to 31 times more likely to be present than women. In all six countries, women were two to 15 times more likely to appear in the art news and media genre than articles on economics, the researchers found.
The study found that, with the exception of India, “gender representation in political news coverage lags behind the actual position of women in political life in Kenya, the US, South Africa and the UK.”
The researchers found no indication that the Me Too movement had an impact on coverage of women’s problems in the United States and Britain, Kassova told VOA. The campaign against sexual harassment and abuse gained prominence in 2017, when Hollywood celebrities and others publicly spoke about their experiences.
Overall, the researchers found that the more ingrained patriarchal norms, the greater the barrier to gender equality. In such countries, both genders seem to believe that women should be submissive to men – a perception that is mirrored in the news environment.
The findings of the report should be approached holistically and intentionally, Makotsi Sittoni said. The Kenyan journalist said the media should be more proactive and inclusive in eliminating gender bias in newsrooms.
The author of the report Kassova agrees, saying that change is possible but only if the editors push for it.
Source link
