Last weekend, Scotland’s feminist organisation Engender launched its Gender Matters Road Map at Scotland’s Feminist Future, a two-day conference in Glasgow. The Road Map is a plan for action designed to significantly reduce gender inequality by 2030, and one of its key aspirations is for “a media full of women’s voices”.
Here’s what it has to say on representation, which has been a key focus for Women in Journalism Scotland since our group’s establishment last year:
Men’s over-representation across the media and creative industries is reflected in widespread stereotyping of women and lack of gender balance in print, on the airwaves and on screen. The portrayal of women across media, popular culture and the arts is damagingly limited, especially for disabled women, minority ethnic women, older women, lesbian, bisexual and trans women.
Both the media and creative industries have immense power to shape the way society views women’s worth and both play a part in perpetuating damaging gender stereotypes which undermine women’s equality. Creativity is not dependent on gender and yet there is marked under-representation of women both in production and visible roles.
So how can we work towards solving these problems? Engender proposes that “the Scottish Government, Creative Scotland and other bodies should work together to”:
- Creative and resource a Scottish “Women in Media Body”
- Use data to create benchmarks of portrayals of women and women’s participation
- Enable gender balance in employment and diversity in representation via public funding programmes and media regulation
The good news is that Scotland already has a women in media body: Women in Journalism Scotland! And we’ve already started working on increasing women’s representation, with training focused on boosting women’s representation on TV and radio and plans for registers to help connect editors not only with media professionals but ultimately also with women experts in other fields.
In a workshop at the conference titled “Bras in the Tardis”: What could a women in media body look like?, the discussion focused on two areas: how women’s representation can be monitored, and what tools will be needed to improve the make change. Women in Journalism Scotland would like to carry on this conversation – what form of monitoring do you think would capture gender-equality deficits in the Scottish media and what tools do you think we need to make positive change?
Monitoring
The Global Media Monitoring Project carries out a survey of news media once every five years, relying on an army of volunteers in countries around the world
In recent years Women for Independence have carried out their own smaller-scale monitoring exercise, #WFIMediaWatch
What should we seek to monitor? Is it enough to count bylines in publications, or the number of women contributors to discussions on TV, radio and podcasts – or do we also need to look at the number of columns inches or broadcast minutes? Perhaps we need to ask what women are writing and talking about, and what prominence their voices are given.
Should the focus be on women journalists and experts, or should monitoring be widened to look at how women are represented in news stories, features, documentaries, and works of fiction? In all of these forms of media, are we interested in monitoring how often women appear, are quoted or are mentioned, or do we also want to analyse what gendered messages are being communicated by the use of adjectives, images or maybe even camera angles?
Tools
Ideas proposed included: a media literacy toolkit; a feminist fact-checking service; guidance for media organisations similar to Zero Tolerance’s Handle with Care guide; and an app to crowd-source evidence of gender bias on panels.
As is necessary in virtually any conversation about women in media, the problem of online abuse and harassment was raised. This, along with women’s reluctance to view themselves as “experts”, was cited a a key reason why women may not put themselves forward to appear in the media, or may decline an invitation to contribute. In light of this, who should take or share responsibility for supporting women in dealing with any backlash? The media organisations themselves? Unions? Employers such as charities, universities and trade organisations? It may not be possible to completely mitigate against the negative consequences of women putting their heads above the parapet, but we can certainly try.
What do you think? What kind of media monitoring would you like to see in Scotland, and what tools do you think are required to a) increase the number of women represented and b) tackle sexist representations of women more generally?
Women In Journalism Scotland 