Author: Anita Sthankiya

The news media is currently living in a “bubble,” equipped with a plethora of problems running much deeper than gender diversity.

This is a systemic issue that has spread across various media platforms, affecting all forms of diversity: gender, ethnic, racial, ideological, ability, economic, and geographic.

This article is the second in a three-part series that dissects the biases in news media, and the resulting consequences of those biases. In part one, I explored the racial biases in so-called “cultural blunders.” In this article, I will evaluate the lack of gender diversity in news media.

The fifth annual Status of Women in the U.S. Media report, by the Women’s Media Centre (WMC), provides a comprehensive assessment of how females fare across all media platforms. According to the report, men still dominate in the media across all platforms — television, newspapers, online, and newswires — with change occurring only incrementally.

Photo credit: WMC.

“Women are not equal partners in telling the story, nor are they equal partners in sourcing and interpreting what and who is important in the story,” states the report.

The authors of the report also say that they salute media advances toward gender and race parity, but are deeply concerned about the areas where media has staggered backward. The WMC examination found that at 20 of the nation’s top news outlets, men produced 62.3 percent of news reports during the studied period. Women only produced 37.7 percent of news reports during that same time.

The study also found that men produced stories mostly on sports, weather, and crime and justice. While bylines by women largely consisted of stories on lifestyle, health, and education news.

The 2017 report also showed a decline in the broadcast news sector. Work by female anchors, field reporters, and correspondents declined, falling to 25.2 percent from 32 percent in the previous year. The WMC’s “Divided 2017” study found that at ABC, CBS, and NBC combined, men report three times as much of the news as women do.

The lack of female representatives in media is still a problem, and women and minorities continue to make substantially less than men, according to the report. Women are not equally represented in all positions, as they account for only one third of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) newsroom employees; the ASNE refers to all news editors currently registered in America. Interestingly enough, the study also found that women were more likely to be employed at online-only sites, rather than at newspapers.

Photo credit: WMC.

Mainstream news media isn’t the only place where women are underrepresented, as the number of female assistant sports editors continues to fall. At 100 U.S. and Canadian newspapers and websites, female sports editors dropped by roughly half, between 2012 and 2014, from 17.2 percent to 9.8 percent.

The authors of the study argue that women continue to be left behind because of the lack of representation in film and television entertainment. The WMC report found that only 11 percent of speaking characters, in a subset of top-grossing films, were aged 60 and older. Of that group, nearly three quarters were men, even though women are aging at a substantially larger subset of the U.S. population.

Hollywood’s top paid union executive — a man — earned 60 percent more than the highest-paid female union executive. “Inclusion or Invisibility? Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment, reviewed how 10 major media companies — 21st Century Fox, CBS, Comcast NBCUniversal, Sony, The Walt Disney Co., Time Warner, Viacom, Amazon, Hulu and Netflix — positioned women entertainers and women entertainment-makers in the industry.

The results were shocking: out of 11,306 speaking characters in film, TV and digital shows, 66.5 percent were male and 33.5 percent were female. In film, 28.7 percent of all speaking roles went to women. In network TV, cable TV, and online streaming shows, the respective figures for women were 36.4 percent, 37.3 percent and 38.1 percent.

Female voices continue to be silenced, in film, television, and on the big screen. As explored in the Inclusion or Invisibility executive summary, women are not only underrepresented in the entertainment industry, but are too often objectified when they are represented in entertainment. In fact, the study found that women are clad in “sexy” attire 34 percent of time. This figure, argues the study, is in direct correlation to the fact that women are not hired as writers, to the same scale that men are hired, in the entertainment world.

Moreover, of the 6,421 writers in film and television, 71 percent are male. Leading to the conclusion, says the study, that women are not being represented properly in the entertainment industry because the material written for women is not coming from a female perspective.

Photo credit: WMC.

This inequality is problematic because our entertainment industry is not reflecting the reality of our society. If we are not seeing strong female roles in film and television, it impacts our perception of women, and what is deemed as a realistic representation of 21st century America.

“Roles that girls and women in television and film play simultaneously reflect how we think about females in our culture, and set expectations for what girls and women can expect to achieve in their lives,” said Martha Lauzen, the WMC executive director. “If we change the roles females play in the symbolic world, we will change the reality for girls and women in the real world.”

The problem is bigger than any one outlet or platform. In order for there to be a shift in our mainstream news media, there needs to be a shift in our entertainment media as well. If women are not included to have equal voices, perspectives, and experiences, how can we accurately represent over half of the population?

Male executives must be willing to intentionally chart a different course, expand the talent pool without trepidation, and develop a more concerted and, perhaps, radical strategy for equally sharing power with women.

In the next part of this series, I will focus on the source of the problem: where the news is derived from and who is behind sharing news across the country.

About DNN

DNN (Decentralized News Network) is a news curation platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. It’s our goal to encourage the dissemination of factual, unbiased political news by incentivizing accountability at all levels of the news consumption process. We’re news for the people, by the people.

Stay up-to-date with the latest project news by following our social channels: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also join our project conversation on Slack: dnnmedia.slack.com, or on Telegram: https://t.me/DNNMedia.

We’re currently in need of journalists, writers, readers, and editors to test out our Alpha updates! Check out our website today, and let us know what you think. Participating in our Alpha will earn you bounty stakes for our DNN Token.