Feminist Media: An Overview

Underrepresentation of Women and Minorities

Fewer women than men have access to the media, and fewer people from minority groups have access. If a woman is from a minority group, she has fewer opportunities to be in the media. And less still if she is a lesbian, is a person of color, or represents a minority religion. Access, in this regard, refers to both visibility of women in the media and the space available to them to use or work within media organizations.

The findings from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication, illustrated this. In 1995, 17% of news subjects were women, and 83% were men. In 2000, when the project was carried out again, women were found to be just 18% and men 82%. In 2005, the third time that the GMMP was conducted, there were 21% women and 79% men—still four men for every woman who appeared in the news.

A similar trend was evident in South Africa over the same period. Only 17% of news sources were female; less than 10% of the sources for politics, economics, and sports stories were women. Only 8% of politician sources were women even though 18% of the members of parliament in the region are women. Media statistics in the United States are in line. A report by Media Matters for 2005 and 2006 stated that men outnumbered women by 4 to 1 as guests on Sunday morning talk television shows.

A second Media Matters report revealed the continuing lack of women and minorities in U.S. prime-time cable news. Women were less than 50% of the guests on a single one of the three cable networks, and on some they comprised as little as 18%. Women in Congress received fewer total newspaper articles; fewer mentions in front-page, national, foreign, metro, business, and sports articles; fewer issue-based articles; and fewer mentions and quotes in newspaper articles than their male counterparts. Northwestern University's Media Management Center 2006 report revealed that women were only 29% of top managers in newspaper companies.

Furthermore, among the few women who climbed the media ladder, many did not represent women's interests. They saw themselves as one of the boys and did not challenge the patriarchal and hierarchical structures and profit-oriented agendas of corporate media.

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