Abstract
The news media are the most influential sources of information, ideas and opinion for most people around the world. Who appears in the news and who is left out, what is covered and what is not and how people and events are portrayed matter. Research has consistently shown that women are underrepresented in the news and that gender stereotypes are reinforced in and through the media. The 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action recognised the relationship between women and media as a major area of concern in achieving gender equality in contemporary societies. This article presents Nordic findings from the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), which is the largest and longest-running study on gender in the world’s media. The findings show that women account for only 1 in 5 of the people interviewed or reported on by Icelandic news media and that women’s overall presence in the news has declined compared to the last GMMP study in 2010. The proportion of women as news subjects is also considerably lower than in other Nordic countries. We argue that the number of women who are journalists, managers in the media industry and decision makers in society has increased, but this shift has not automatically changed the representation of women in the news, either in numbers or in their portrayal. This discrepancy indicates that the relationship between gender and the news media is complicated and needs to be approached from different perspectives.
Highlights
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action produced at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women recognises the relationship between women and media as a major area of concern in achieving gender equality in contemporary societies
A 1962 article in a popular weekly magazine noted that the journalism profession had clearly become popular among women, and as proof, the article contained short interviews with all eight women working as journalists in Iceland at the time (Blaðakonur á Ísland 1962)
The number of women and men as news subjects and as journalists were coded for each story, the types of news in which they were found, and the roles they played in the news, along with the stories’ topics, scope, space and reference to sex, gender equality and human rights legislation and policy
Summary
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action produced at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women recognises the relationship between women and media as a major area of concern in achieving gender equality in contemporary societies. The action platform stresses the importance of increasing women’s participation in and access to expression and decision making in and through the media and promoting a balanced, non-stereotyped portrayal of women in the media (World Conference on Women 1995). In a world where hard news is still mainly reported and presented by men journalists need to stand up for gender equality This equality is not just a women’s issue; everyone benefits from eliminating discrimination (White 2009, V). At the 1995 conference in Beijing, the findings of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the first global study of the representation and portrayal of women and men in the world’s news media, were presented. We argue that this issue needs to be approached from a broad perspective
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
