Women and news

 

Selección

Introduction 

In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread around the world and political leaders began to realise that an immediate response to the pandemic would involve personal sacrifices and public action, politicians and their directors of public health policies took to stadiums, lecterns, and cameras to speak about the need to stay home, shut schools and nurseries, ration access to grocery stores and health services.

The men, and they were usually men, spoke of social cohesion and a need to act selflessly and responsibly. The women, and they were usually women, who took on the greatest burden on housework, childcare and responsibility for ageing parents, sighed, took a deep breath and got to work.

News exists in the context of the audience (Fletcher and Nielsen 2017a) and, this year, the audience have experienced the social upheavals of the year very differently and have had their concerns addressed very differently. But in a year full of change, the underrepresentation of women in much of the news is not one of the things that changed.

Luba Kassova’s comprehensive look at the women in media during the COVID-19 crisis highlights just how the media in much of the world has failed women in the content it produces (Kassova 2020). Her report documents the extent to which women’s voices have been missing from media coverage of the crisis, even as women feel the impact of the pandemic and associated lockdowns and restrictions the hardest.

Her findings echo Gaye Tuchman (1978) who four decades ago documented what she dubbed women’s ‘symbolic annihilation’ from the media and noted that most media portray women, if at all, in traditional roles: homemaker, mother, or, if they are in the paid workforce, clerical and other ‘pink-collar’ jobs. Such patterns have been documented time and again by the Global Media Monitoring Project’s regular ‘Who Makes the News’ reports, most recently in 2015 (Macharia et al. 2015). And as the long-term impacts of COVID-19 resonate through society it is clear that women have been hit the hardest financially.1

This report takes a look at the other side, not the news itself, but the people who use it, and presents a bespoke analysis of how women around the world consume and perceive news, based on data on audience behaviour from 11 countries featured in the 2020 Reuters Institute Digital News Report: Kenya, South Africa, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and United States. We have selected these 11 to represent as wide a geographical base as possible, and cover some of the richest and poorest countries in the report.

The present work builds on the Digital News Report and associated research, including the Women and Leadership in the News Media 2020: Evidence from Ten Markets factsheet (Andı et al. 2020) we published on 8 March 2020, in which we documented gender disparities in leadership on the premise that top editorial positions in major outlets matter both substantially and symbolically, as the personal experience of top editors will in part sometimes influence the decisions they make, building on decades of work documenting gendered patterns in news coverage, news work, and promotion inside news organisations (e.g. Franks 2013; Callison and Young 2019).

Our report brings audience data and other evidence to a wider debate about whether the media industry is fair to women: whether they are treated with respect as sources of information and as experts, whether the issues that impact on them are treated honestly and fairly.

The report also includes country profiles which look more closely into issues of media and gender in those countries, including discussions on newsroom gender balance and examples of new and innovative media aimed directly at women. It looks at some of the biggest debates that have happened in those countries over how women are portrayed, discussed, and treated by the news industry.

The aim of this report is to provide data on women’s news consumption but also to paint a picture of how women interact with news at all levels, and hopefully provide journalists, industry leaders, governments, and policy makers who want to reach women with some ideas on how this may be done.

As the country profiles show, a growing set of women-led protest movements against femicide, sexual assault, and online harassment around the world have created a new debate around how the news portrays women, and new conversations about who is in the newsroom deciding the agenda and framing the news. While news reporting has sometimes played an important role in these debates, it is also clear that many of them are driven by feminists who use social media as activist tools to speak out and organise against sexism and misogyny, sometimes in the news media too (Mendes et al. 2019). We see this with #MeToo, but also important specific mobilisations around e.g. #EleNão in Brazil, #ProtestToo in Hong Kong, and many more.

This is part of a broader trend where historically disenfranchised populations in many countries are using digital media to work around often white- and male-dominated established news media spaces they have long been excluded from. Our audience data demonstrate that women engage with established news media in ways that are sometimes quite different from those in which men engage with news (Jackson et al. 2020).

By combining our unique, cross-country data on news and media use with country profiles capturing key parts of developments on the ground in countries around the world, this report aims to contribute to the continued important conversation around women and news.

Seguir leyendo: Reuters Institute

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