GMMP Screenshot
United Methodist Insight Screenshot
There’s a saying that women hold up half the sky, but you can’t tell it from observing the world’s media, say Christian communicators and women’s advocates.
The continued dearth of women in media compared to their proportion in the world population forms a major finding of the sixth Global Media Monitoring Project sponsored by the World Association of Christian Communication. The latest results were released July 14 via an online panel, a YouTube highlights video, and a downloadable copy of the report, “Who Makes the News?”
A WACC press release stated: “The sixth GMMP report includes data from 116 country teams and covers 30,172 stories published in newspapers, broadcast on radio and television, and disseminated on news websites and via news media tweets. It presents a gender analysis on what, if any, has changed in the presence, representation and voice of the subjects and sources in the news since the first GMMP was conducted in 1995.”
According to Dr. Glory Dharmaraj, former director of spiritual formation for United Methodist Women and president of the WACC‘s North American section, the research project found a 1 percent increase in the coverage of women in the media. Overall, however, women are represented in media only 25 percent of the time despite making up half the world’s population, the research found.
United Methodist Women focused its July 15 FaithTalks podcast on the GMMP, featuring panelists Sarah Macharia, the project's global coordinator and a WACC staff member based in Nairobi, Kenya; Philip Lee, general secretary of WACC based in Canada; and Dr. Dharmaraj, who lives in New York. The media monitoring report provides data to inform UMW’s primary mission of serving the needs of women and girls worldwide.
During the online panel, Dr. Dharmaraj likened the GMMP to the documentation of women found in the Bible and to the documentation of women's status historically provided by United Methodist Women and its predecessor bodies. United Methodist Women participated in the most recent GMMP study.
U.S. GMMP survey
Chart Courtesy of Sarah Macharia, WACC
Although there have been slight increases in media coverage for women, the report states: “All things remaining equal, it will take at least a further 67 years to close the average gender equality gap in traditional news media. In 2015, the period remaining to full gender equality based on the GEM Index was 72 years, thus the 2020 result signals consistency in the slow cumulative pace of change over time. Full gender equality on numerical counts, however, is insufficient without improvement in the quality of journalism from a gender perspective.”
News quality, defined as the presence of women as sources or subjects, declined from 2015 to 2020, even in news that most concerns them such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, the report stated.
“Furthermore, that girls and women are underrepresented in stories about sexual harassment, rape and sexual assault particularly now, during Covid-19 times when such acts have reached epidemic proportions, signals a serious deficit in news media accountability to women. The most severe underrepresentation in GBV [gender-based violence] stories takes place in newspapers, in which women are just 35% of subjects and sources,” states the report.
There was one bright spot in the GMMP findings:
“Following stagnation between 2005 and 2015, women’s visibility as reporters has increased by three percentage points overall across print and broadcast news. Currently, four out of 10 stories in traditional news media are reported by women, compared to 37% since 2005. In the past two decades, women’s newspaper byline credits have increased by 11 points, their visibility in newscasts has increased by 9%, and online, 42% of journalists named in news articles, seen or heard in multimedia clips are women.”
The worldwide study was conducted through collaboration by “various women’s rights organizations, grassroots groups, media associations, faith-based / interfaith organizations, university students and researchers around the world,” according to the WACC.
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.