Womens blog

Why does this shocking dearth of women in the media persist?

The figures by Women in Journalism, showing that women don't even make up a third of all contributors to the media, are a disgrace. Why can't they break that '30% barrier'?
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Gender divide … women appear on the front cover of newspapers - but men still run the media.
Gender divide … women appear on the front pages of newspapers – but men still overwhelmingly write the stories. Photograph: Martin Argles For The Guardian

If you were to divide something equally between two children, would you give 80% to the boy and the rest to the girl? Few parents and no child would. So why is it that when it comes to representation in the media, or in politics or so many walks of life, gender equality is stuck at 80/20?

In so many areas of public life it's as if 30% is an absolute limit that cannot be crossed. There's the percentage of MPs in the House of Commons and the number of boardrooms seats filled by women (not the CEO job, you understand where just 3% of FTSE 100 jobs are held by women). There's even a club of chairmen (not women of course) committed to changing this last statistic. It's called the 30% Club.

For women in the media, the number often comes as a surprise. When you look around newspaper offices or TV stations today they seem pretty equally split between men and women. And yet today's research, led by me as chair of Women in Journalism, is one of several to find that in fact when it comes to writing the news or appearing in it, women still can't quite make it up to a third of all contributions.

Not just when it comes to bylines (split 78/22 in this analysis of nine national titles) but for those quoted or mentioned as well. Of the 668 men and women mentioned, an astonishing 84% are men and 16% women.

So it seems that the Today programme, the flagship BBC news show, is not alone with its pathetic record of getting women on air to talk about the news.

Why? A study by management consultants at McKinsey suggested that 30% was the point at which a group began to feel all-pervasive, the point at which people felt there were a lot of them, when they stopped feeling like a representative sample of their sex or race or class. Below that, the dominant group accepted their presence.

There are many other reasons put forward for women's failure to break through the 30% barrier of course. Does it simply reflect the number of women prepared to work long, inflexible hours; those typical of a newsroom or a parliament for example? Does it reflect the fact that it is mothers who are still more likely to choose jobs that allow them to leave at a regular time if they can. And let's be honest, the sorts of jobs we are looking at here – politics and journalism – often allow an element of choice and not just financial necessity. Yet they are important because of their role in setting the national debate, in changing the nation's laws.

Do I want my daughter to see only serious men as leaders and women and girls as either victims or lucky in marriage?

The Women in Journalism research is the first to look at several aspects of the front page: bylines, mentions or quotes and also pictures. Others, especially the important work done by my colleague Kira Cochrane, studied all bylines or the number of men who were quoted compared with women (the 4th Estate research carried out in America earlier this year). But we wanted to look at how women are represented on front pages which, despite declining readership and revenues, still help dictate the day's agenda for both online and broadcast news, and which are seen on news stands by my daughter even if she can't read them.

The one area which defies my positing of some sort of magic number was the use of pictures; this was the only area in which the number of women broke through the 30% ceiling. Yet when you consider that the Duchess of Cambridge was the single most photographed woman (19 pictures compared with 13 for the next most photographed) and that her sister, Pippa Middleton, and Madeleine McCann were the only two other females to make the top 10 most depicted individuals it seems fair to say that this triumph was not a result of any position of authority or individual achievement. Two women famous for their family connections and one child victim of a hideous crime; the three most depicted females in an average month of newspaper front pages.

In contrast, the three men most likely to be photographed in the month in question were Simon Cowell, with a book out, Nicolas Sarkozy, with an election to lose, and Jeremy Hunt, a scandal-hit minister. In the way of much research, this latest study almost raises as many questions as it answers. Are pictures of women used to sell papers? (Newspaper focus on the Duchess of Cambridge suggests the answer is yes but it's complicated.) Are women treated differently to men? (Again the analysis of a sample of those quoted also suggest the answer is yes.)

Do women buy more papers written by other women? If the figures from the Mail and the Express are anything to go by (a higher proportion of female readers than other papers and higher numbers of women writing the front page), then again the answer is yes. Yet it is these two papers that are often criticised by women's groups such as those talking to the Leveson inquiry for their portrayal of women.

Evidence from the End Violence Against Women coalition to Leveson cites the example from the Daily Mail in which the words "orgy" and "Lolita" were used about 12-year-old girls being gang-raped in a park.

This area of our national life warrants further investigation and greater challenge. Our research certainly offers ample evidence of the sort of thing described by Anna van Heeswijk, from the anti-objectification of women organisation Object, in her evidence.

"We have to ask ourselves what kind of story does it tell to young people when men in newspapers wear suits, or sports gear, are shown as active participants, while women are sexualised objects who are essentially naked or nearly naked," she said.

The groups are calling for new regulation of the press to ban pictures of naked or semi-naked women in newspapers, arguing that the images would not be allowed in the workplace and should not be sold in an "unrestrained" manner at "children's eye-level".

Would having an equal number of women writing the stories, or being taken seriously within them, make a difference to this portrayal of their sex? At the current rate of progress we may never know.

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