WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN THE HEADLINES?

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN THE HEADLINES?

By Ambika Chandrasekar and the Elastic Tree team

NOVEMBER 2023

Introduction

Gender Equality is one of the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals”. All goals need measures - to monitor progress, to course correct if needed, and to hold the proverbial mirror in front of us Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Economic Sciences Nobel laureate has given us a long-term historical perspective on women’s earnings and participation in the labour market.

Her data and analysis have helped uncover key drivers of gender differences in the labour market over the past three centuries Her work, and those of others studying the role of women in the labour force, both through time and across countries, underscores the importance of gender parity as an urgent need and focus area.

Social factors play as much of a role as economic ones in determining just how quickly women enter and progress in the workforce And the media plays a central role in guiding societal attitudes by shaping opinion and creating awareness of the many benefits of an increased role for women in the economy.

While media can potentially play a critical role in promoting Gender Equality, the reality is sobering The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is the world’s longest-running and most extensive research on gender in the news media. As per their 2020 survey of 20 Indian print newspapers, only 15% of newsmakers or sources quoted were women

We at Elastic Tree are very conscious of gender parity and inclusiveness and strive to bring out the best in our teams by working around their life-stage pressures and commitments. We are also data science people. We love to look at the numbers and search for trends and qualitative insights by using appropriate measures and statistics

Given our interest in Gender Equality, we decided to do a pilot study with five leading English newspapers to quantify the representation of women in the news, as newsmakers and as news sources. The idea was to understand, quantitatively, whether there has been any improvement, post-Covid, to the 15% share of 2020? In addition, we wanted to assess these metrics across newspapers and across the different sections of each newspaper

Whatwedid

We conducted a simple exercise with 5 English newspapersThe Hindu, The Telegraph, Economic Times, Financial Express and The Hindustan Times

For the month of June 2023, we perused every page of these newspapers (E-papers) and for every article, manually noted –

The gender of the newsmaker

1 The gender of the news source or expert

3.

2. The nature of the visual content.

The aim of the study was not the gender of the journalist but of the news itself

In this study, we focused on the main (news) sections of the newspapers and did not take the supplements or magazine sections into account. Our intent was to gauge the presence of women newsmakers in the news

For the Editorial pages, we looked at the gender of the writer of the opinion piece.

We categorized the visual content as follows:

Single male

Single female

Group male (group photos with only males)

Group female(group photos with only females)

Mixed-gender photos (group photos with both genders represented)

Stock photos

Non-human content

Data visualisation

We counted more than 9,000 newsmakers over the month, as also over 5,000 bits of visual content

Theproportionofwomen newsmakersstaysata disappointing15%

Newsmakers - Female vs. Male

2023 sees no change over the 2020 GMMP proportion.

City news, leisure, etc understandably see more women newsmakers at 19%.

With the dominance of the Ukraine war and Modi’s visit to the US in June, the World pages underperformed only 11% of newsmakers on the International pages were women

46%ofthe1,617newspageswescannedhad nowomennewsmakersorwomennews sources.

Page counts by no. of newsmakers

Contrast this to 24 pages with no male newsmakers specifically mentioned, or less than 2%, and one gets to see the enormity of the imbalance. (These 24 pages had articles that were govt announcements or RBI press releases, Ministry Spokesperson etcno specific male or female source or newsmaker. )

While the average number of male newsmakers per page is around 5, it is less than 1 for women. The pages with more than 5 women newsmakers were all Sports pages with team news

While we did not analyse the role of the woman in the news item, a good proportion appeared to be women as victims of crime – rape robbery, accidents, etc

HTperformsrelativelybetter

Relative performance of the five newspapers

For this analysis, we only looked at sections that were common across the newspapers. Newspaper-specific sections, like Technology, Start-Ups, etc were considered in the Overall share but not individually

Hindustan Times appears to be moving in the right direction – the best-performing of the 5 newspapers we studied. HT was the best performer in most sections, except City News and Leisure, where ET was at 30% women newsmakers – the best score HT’s performance was very poor in the business section, however.

The two financial papers - FE and ET – were neck and neck overall – both needing to hugely improve their performance in reaching out to women professionals as sources of news and as newsmakers.

14%ofEditorialcolumnsare bywomen

The Hindu performed abysmally on the presence of women columnists in the Editorial pages Across the entire month of June, there were 5 pieces by women as against 81 by men Suhasini Haider accounted for two of these pieces, and one each by Sheikh Hasina, Zoya Hasan and Tatiana Belosouva! Contrast this 6% to a more respectable 19% for the Telegraph and 20% for the Hindustan Times

The HT, in contrast, seems to have a regular column on gender issues in the Editorial pages by Namita Bhandare, and Barkha Dutt is a regular columnist.

So too the Telegraph, with their “Fifth Column”.

FE seems to have many shorter columns on their Editorial Pages, so their 15% share of women Editorial columnists translated into more pieces by women – 19

Newsmakersshare

In 30 days, we tagged 9,532 newsmakers across the five newspapers; of this, as many as 3,445 or 36% were from the pages of The Telegraph

The Telegraph seems to have more people in their news than the other newspapers. HT was the least “peopled” newspaper, with only a 14% share of all newsmakers

But HT‘s share of women newsmakers (18%) is significantly higher than their share of all male newsmakers, (13%), which appears to be an indication of intent at moving the gender needle

For FE and ET, their share of women newsmakers is much lower than their share of male newsmakers

Humannewsmakersmakeup66%of thevisualcontent,innumbers.

Visual Content

Of the 5,414 pieces of visual content accompanying the news, 66% were pictures of the newsmakers.

It can be seen that there is a lot of variation between the newspapers – the Financial dailies have other visualisations as well, whereas, for The Hindu, as much as 84% were pictures of newsmakers

Other content includes stock images, non-human visuals, environment-related pictures, as well as data graphics.

Gendershareofhumanvisuals –13%female

Male photos – individual and all-male groups make up an astonishing 78% of human pictures in the newspaper only 13% are female and 9% are mixed –that is, having individuals of both genders.

In the month of June, we counted a total of 462 female photos and 2,791 male photos. There were more (743) pictures of inanimate objects across the five newspapers than of women newsmakers

The Telegraph has a 15% share of women newsmakers' photos, and the Hindu has 14%

Among the business newspapers FE and ET, FE has only 10% female photos, while ET has 15%

Gendershareofhumanvisuals

In the Sports section, The Hindu and the Telegraph seem to have a relatively better visual presence for women sportspersons.

Conclusions

We measured no change in gender proportional representation in Indian news reporting in June 2023, with the 15% share of 2020 not improving, post-Covid

Men continue to dominate as the quoted experts in all fields.

Sections on Economy, Business and Technology seem to perform even more poorly.

Anecdotally, it seems that Sports has shown an uptick, with women sportspersons getting slightly more coverage these days. In 2014, for example at the Asian Games – this was the observation in a gender study carried out in a doctoral thesis by Dhiman Chattopadhyay-

“The accomplishments of the male athletes were framed as more important. For instance, the silver medal-winning effort of male discus thrower Vikas Gowda was the front-page lead story as was squash player Sourav Ghoshal’s silver-winning effort However, when the women’s 4 x 400-meter relay team won gold for the fourth consecutive Asian Games – a record – it merited just 39 lines and a photograph on page 3 of the sports pages” .

Wayforward

Elastic Tree believes that a conscious push by media houses for gender parity in source of news will be an important step in the long run to more women in the headlines, and, eventually, to a better representation of women in the workforce.

We plan to expand and regularise this exercise, to provide an audit and to track change in the area of gender parity in newsmakers and sources

We hope that a simple tracker like this will lead to media houses, newspaper editors and journalists being more mindful during the process of reporting.

Is it not possible to look for a woman expert outside the current network of sources for regular aspects of politics, business economics, and science?

At the moment, women come to the front of a newspaper only on Women’s Day and when reporting on gender issues.

Wayforward

World Association of News Publishers (WAN) highlights three examples from around the world –

Tech trackers – The Financial Times has developed a bot that uses pronouns and first name recognition, to throw up a warning when an article quotes too many men. Bloomberg uses tech to highlight articles and interviews with women.

Simple counting methods – BBC launched their 50:50 Equality Project which is data-driven, voluntary and self-monitoring. So too, Sweden’s VK Media, and improved the gender parity from 23% to 49%!

Ethics policy from above – At The Mint, gender parity in the composition of journalists, editors and leadership team is bringing in constructive and helpful changes. One such is the creation of a “sourcebook for journalists that includes women experts in male-dominated fields, such as politics, business, finance, economics and engineering to improve gender parity in their articles ”

AnnexureaboutGMMP

“It began in 1995 when volunteers in 71 countries around the world monitored women’s presence in their national radio, television, and print news. The media monitoring has been repeated every five years since then, taking stock of changes in the gender dimensions of news media content and collecting statistical data on new indicators

The 1995 research revealed that only 17% of news subjects – the people who are interviewed or whom the news is about – were women. It found that gender parity was a distant prospect in any region of the world News [were] more often being presented by women but [they were] still rarely about women.

The first noteworthy change in women’s overall presence in the news was registered in 2005 in the third iteration of the research. Women comprised 21% of news subjects, a three-percentage point increase over the period 2000 to 2005. Their near invisibility continued, however, with only 10% of stories focusing centrally on women, underrepresentation in the major news topics and as voices in the news.

The 2015 research in 114 countries revealed continued severe gender disparities in news media content. Findings on key indicators suggested that progress towards gender equality had lost traction; women remained only 24% of the persons heard, read about, or seen in newspaper, television, and radio news, the same level found in the fourth wave of the research in 2010 Three editions of the research in 2005, 2010 and 2015 – found no change on the indicator measuring women’s participation in the news as reporters; only 37% of stories in legacy media were reported by women ”

Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP); https://whomakesthenews org/the-gmmp/

AboutElasticTree

Established in 2014, Elastic Tree stands out as a dynamic market research firm specializing in the extraction and interpretation of consumer insights. With a team of seasoned researchers, the company dedicates itself to assisting businesses in realizing their growth and marketing objectives

Over the years, Elastic Tree has solidified its position as a trustworthy market research partner, serving clients across diverse industries both in India and overseas

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References

World Association of News Publishers (WAN); https://wan-ifra org/ The Hindu; 1st June to 30th June 2023.

The Telegraph; 1st June to 30th June 2023

Economic Times; 1st June to 30th June 2023.

Financial Express; 1st June to 30th June 2023

The Hindustan Times; 1st June to 30th June 2023

Abouttheauthor

The project was led by Ambika Chandrasekar She is a market research and brand planning specialist, who holds a Master’s degree in Applied Psychology from Madras University. With over 30 years in the industry, she has worked with prestigious organizations like Hansa Research Group, Euromonitor, and RKSBBDO. Currently, she works as Head of Branding and Consumer Insights at Elastic Tree "

Support Team: Shilaja B, Sunil Mukkath, David Weston, Shanthinee, Palani, Pradeep, Tony P, Suraj, Bhalaji, Supreetha and Rini Mukkath.