Comparing Gender and Media Equality Across the Globe

"The lack of women's voices, status, and recognition in the news media is a challenge to both human rights and a sustainable future."

This book examines the factors, causes, and consequences that encourage gender equality in the news media. It contains research articles that examine equality in news media content and in news media organisations, offering empirical analyses of both the causes and consequences of media and gender equality in countries across the globe. All articles draw on the Comparing Gender and Media Equality Across the Globe (GEM) dataset, with the intention of inspiring "future research by making existing data on gender and news media equality available to the global research community."

The GEM dataset comprises of hundreds of indicators on media and gender equality pooled from three datasets - the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media (IWMF), and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) - as well as a selection of other key context variables, including measures of gender equality in society, women's political representation, and economic development. The dataset also includes the GEM-Index (GEM-I), a measure to keep track of key aspects of gender equality in television, radio, newspapers, and online.

All authors who contributed to the publication were committed to use at least one of the three datasets included in the GEM dataset. As explained in the book, the authors "represent a plurality of perspectives on gender equality and have independently chosen their topics, based on their current research agendas. Each chapter can be read independently, and together they present a rich spectrum of ideas on how to approach and use comparative data on gender equality in the media."

The book addresses three key questions, which form the structure of the chapters:

1. Qualities: How has gender equality in news media content, media organisations, and media access and use developed over time and across different countries, and how are the different aspects related?
2. Causes: To what extent can differences in gender equality in the media be explained as a result of variations in economic, political, social, and cultural factors in society, as well as factors pertaining to differences in media systems?
3. Consequences: To what degree is gender equality in the media related to other aspects of a "good society", such as democracy, media freedom, economic and social development and good government, the latter particularly with regard to freedom from corruption?

The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1. Introduction: Comparing gender and media equality across the globe: Understanding the qualities, causes, and consequences, by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Maria Edström - This introductory chapter outlines the project rationale and clarifies the normative theories supporting the striving for gender equality in and through the news media. It seeks to give context for this study by highlighting previous research, discussing key methodological considerations, explaining the value of the various datasets used in the project, and providing an overview of the global commitments to improve gender equality in the media. Finally, it gives an overview of the book and a summary of the main insights from the project.

Qualities

• Chapter 2. The GEM-Index: Constructing a unitary measure of gender equality in the news, by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Maria Edström - A key question is how to measure progress in the news media. Composite indices are frequently used to monitor the status or progress of global developments. By drawing from data collected by the GMMP, the authors of this chapter devise the Gender Equality in the news Media Index (GEM-I), a composite index that estimates the gender gap between women and men regarding their status in the news.
• Chapter 3. Media gender-equality regimes: Exploring media organisations' policy adoption across nations - by Claudia Padovani and Rossella Bozzon - This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of gender and media concerns by focusing on an under-researched aspect: the policy dimension. It addresses the nexus between the socioeconomic and cultural environments within which the media operate across the world and examines the policies that media organisations have adopted to promote gender equality.

Causes

• Chapter 4. Explaining gender equality in news content: Modernisation and a gendered media field, by Monika Djerf-Pierre - This chapter seeks to address the following questions: To what extent is gender (in)equality in the news a reflection, or extension, of existing social inequalities? And how can we understand the origins of cross-country differences?
• Chapter 5. Axes of power: Examining women's access to leadership positions in the news media, by Carolyn M. Byerly & Katherine A. McGraw - This chapter examines factors associated with women's occupational advancement within news organisations, as well as the relationship between their newsroom status and representation in news content. It seeks to expand what is known about women's place in a profession that is recognised as essential in providing women greater visibility, a public voice, and expanded participation in civic and political life.
• Chapter 6. The media world versus the real world of women and political representation: Questioning differences and struggling for answers, by Karen Ross, Marloes Jansen, and Tobias Bürger - This chapter looks at the relationship between women, politics, and news and explores some of the reasons why the representation of political women seems so problematic. Media professionals often suggest that fewer women than men politicians appear in the news because there are relatively few women in any given parliament or because most senior politicians - who are inherently more newsworthy than other categories of political commentator, according to traditional notions of news value (see Gans, 1979) - are men. While both explanations are plausible and likely explain some of women's underrepresentation, they are rarely accompanied with any data to show the extent to which they actually do explain the presence - or in this case, relative absence - of women politicians in the news. It is this lack of testing such explanations that the authors set out to address in this chapter.

Consequences

• Chapter 7. Fairer sex or fairer system? Exploring the relationship between gender equality in the media and media corruption, by Mathias A. Färdigh - This chapter starts from three assumptions: first, that corruption and the abuse of entrusted power for private gain is a major obstacle to democracy and impacts societies in a multitude of destructive ways; second, that corruption also exists within the structure of media organisations and in the way journalists carry out their work; and third, that there are anticipated connections between numbers and outcomes in that the presence of more women in the media is associated with lower levels of media corruption. This study is a first attempt to investigate if - and, in that case, how - gender representation in the news media is connected to corruption, by examining the relationship between the share of women journalists and the level of perceived media corruption in a sample of more than 2,900 country-year observations covering 138 countries between 1995 and 2015, retrieved from the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) dataset.
• Chapter 8. Gender in economic journalism: Impeccably accurate or smoke and mirrors?, by Sarah Macharia - The extent to which news content reflects women's equal engagement in the economic system is still unknown. This chapter explores the veracity of the "symbolic annihilation thesis", defined as the under-representation and trivialisation of women in media content (Tuchman et al., 1978), at a global level, examining business and economic news specifically and corresponding indicators in the physical, material world. Applying the comparative method, this chapter features a correlation analysis of longitudinal media data from the GMMP and socioeconomic statistical data gathered in 134 countries across the period 2005-2015.