PRIMED Gender Learning Brief

"According to the 2020 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), women make up only 25% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news..."

This Learning Brief seeks to summarise key issues, evidence, and trends around media and gender and offers a number of possible solutions to the key challenges currently faced by women in the media globally. The brief has been published as part of the Protecting Independent Media for Effective Development (PRIMED) project, a three-year programme to support public interest media in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone (see Related Summaries, below). It is intended to help PRIMED partners in the three countries identify opportunities to empower women as both media consumers and content producers, as well as to amplify the voices of women in the media.

The brief highlights the following key challenges:

• Women are poorly represented in media content, especially in news related to politics and government.
• Media perpetuate stereotypes that cause women to change their behaviour because of the pressure they feel to be or act in a certain way.
• Women lack access to information, which exacerbates existing gender norms and inequalities.
• Different consumption habits between women and men are not being taken into consideration, and, therefore, the listening needs of women are not being addressed.
• Lack of access to technology for women in many countries means that the digital divide is growing between men and women.
• Women are under-represented in the media sector, with women more often reporting on 'soft topics' such as health and social issues, while men more commonly report on 'hard topics' such as politics and economics.
• Women journalists are more likely to be the target of sexual harassment, which can include gender-based harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion.

Some of the solutions outlined in the brief deal with the following:

• The role of media in changing gender norms - Media should, for example, share a wider variety of roles and behaviours pertaining to different sexes and empower women and girls by providing them with platforms to voice their opinions and participate in public life.
• Making a business case for (gender) diversity in media companies - The brief makes the point that gender diversity can have a positive effect on the sustainability and viability of the media by impacting on financial performance, talent retention, innovation, reputation, team performance, and motivation.
• Increasing and fostering diverse talent - A better diversity climate and an inclusive leadership style can reduce turnover, increase employee satisfaction and engagement, and improve the performance of diverse teams.
• Successful strategies to increase gender equality in the workplace - The brief offers a number of suggestions in relation to this. For example, it suggests that media should always ensure there are enough women at the entry and middle levels of a company to select from and promote in order for there to be parity at the most senior, decision-making levels.

Other solutions look at content formats that can promote gender equality in the public sphere, as well as the role of self-regulation in ensuring that women are more fairly represented in media outputs.