Key Findings

Research has documented the dimensions of the problem, in particular, a longitudinal study launched by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) in 1995 comparing participation in the news industry globally by men and women based on the published bylines of stories.

The data have been collected at five-year intervals, with 114 countries participating in 2015. The findings indicated that female reporters wrote an average of only 37% of the published stories in that year—though this number did represent an increase of 9% over the finding in the first year of the study that women wrote 28% of stories.

More specifically, women in 2015 reported 41% of the stories on the radio, 38% of those on television, and 35% of those in newspapers; thus, women were most underrepresented in newspapers.

The situation is even worse in Asia. Thus, a recent IMWF report found that only 20.7% of news industry workers in Asia and Oceania were female and that women occupied just 9.2% of top management positions.

Data from the Worlds of Journalism indicate, not surprisingly, that a strong correlation exists between the proportion of women working in journalism and the proportion of women in top editorial positions. Correlation does not, of course, necessarily entail causation, but it seems clear that national markets in which a relatively large proportion of women are working in journalism also tend to be characterized by relatively large numbers of women in top editorial positions.

Nevertheless, in nine of the ten markets represented in the data, a significantly larger proportion of women were working as journalists than the proportion of women employed as top editors.

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