Today’s story by Wayne Flower in Daily Mail Australia on the ABC’s 50:50 Project is invented nonsense.

The ABC is not “paying people to scour its website to ensure men and women are equally represented”.

There is no “team of staff to check every story published each day to count how many women and men are pictured and quoted in its online content”.

And this non-existent team is not made up of “casual employees believed to be paid about $39 an hour”.

While this story is laughable, it’s serious that in 2019 a thoughtful, rigorous, evidence-based global media initiative to address a real and persistent problem in news coverage should be treated in such a trivialising and misleading manner.

As we have stated publicly: quite simply, we’re doing this project to make our journalism better and ensure we’re relevant to more Australians.

In an era where audiences have more choices, we are constantly thinking about how to make our news offering more appealing and relevant to the audiences that we serve — and that includes women.

Women represent more than half the population of Australia and we have an obligation to represent as wide a variety of their views as possible, and ensure our stories speak to them on topics and issues that are important to them.

Factual information on the project can be found in the Backstory report we published in August.

Media contact: Sally Jackson | ABC NEWS | jackson.sally@abc.net.au