The 4th Estate, an American research group, released a study about
media which shows that in the reports on issues concerning women, such as
abortion or birth control, men tend to be quoted five times more than women.
In
the stories about abortion written in the national newspapers, such as The New
York Times or The Wall Street Journal, about 81% quotes come from men, but only
12% from women and 7% from organizations.
When concerning the stories about
birth control, men had 75% of the quotes, whereas women had 19% and organizations
6%.
As for the women’s rights topics, women got about 31% of the quotes, men
52% and organizations 17%.
Men are also dominant when it comes to the
elections, economy and foreign policy. When considering broadcasting, men had
about 80% of quotes during the election shows on national television.
Another
study, so called The OpEd Project, demonstrates that the majority of
opinion columns are written by men as well.
The whole article can be found here.
And here is info about a four week study of nine national British newspapers,
carried out by an organization called Women in Journalism: it showed that 78% of
articles on the front pages have men authors and about 84% of those quoted or
mentioned are men. Only 16% belonged to women, who were mostly victims or
celebrities.
As far as photographs are concerned – if there was a photo of a
powerful woman, e.g. a politician, it was not a flattering one.
Harriet Hartman,
the deputy leader of the Labour party,
says that media should be unbiased, and she asks a question how
British journalism can be objective, when most of the reports about men in
parliament are written by men.
There have been issues concerning how BBC treats
women – how ageism and sexism is reflected on TV screens. There is also a
problem with the shortage of women in broadcasting, especially news.
As a woman, I find this situation very unsatisfying. I think women should be represented in media more.
That’s an interesting point, I’ve never thought about quoting from the gender perspective. I agree with you that the situation is unsatisfying. However, the question is whether it’s just a problem of quoting itself. I mean, what if men really state something worth quoting more often than women? In other words, as long as men dominate in important positions, they will also have better opportunity to express their opinions, and thus they will be quoted more often.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I see your point. But I mean, let the men "rule" the politics, economy etc. (because there is not a chance women would dominate in such areas), but then at least let more women speak in media so we can see their perspective as well, especially in those areas mentioned in the first article - women's issues. That was my biggest concern, why are men quoted more here. I think it would be rather appropriate for women to speak about such problems.
ReplyDeleteGreat articles! I think women are slowly making their way to be heard and represented. And maybe it's better in some ways that men rule the politics etc., sometimes women behave too much like males and there we go, we get to the point where it doesn't matter who rules because it's the male way everywhere (not always bad but sometimes too harsh and little caring with no female perspective). The thing with abortions is that it's a dealbreaker in the USA because of certain religious and moral views on that topic. It might take a while before American women get their rights (which really belong to them) back.
ReplyDeleteRight, I totally agree!
ReplyDeleteIf you're interested in these issues, you might want to have a look at this organization -- the International Women's Media Foundation:
ReplyDeletehttp://iwmf.org/
Recently this group published a big report, based on a two-year study of women in the media around the world. It's available on the site, along with summaries:
http://iwmf.org/pioneering-change/global-research-on-women-in-the-news-media.aspx
Meanwhile, I see that the EU has an initiative aimed at increasing the number of women on corporate boards of directors. Their goal is 40% women. That would spill over into the media, of course, because it would mean that more big businesses had prominent female spokespeople who would then be quoted in stories about business, finance, and all the various specific issues with which the companies in question are involved. (For instance, if defense contractors had more women in decision-making roles, then we'd hear more often from women speaking about defense issues.) As an EU initiative, that project doesn't necessarily affect the U.S., but it should have some impact in Britain -- although Britain is often among the less enthusiastic participants in EU initiatives, since the EU is still very controversial there.