The media need more women

If when reading the title you think “Oh no, not another post about gender inequality”, please first scroll all the way down to “About the author”.

Have you done that?
Good. Now please read on.

I got the idea for this post thanks to Patrizia Laeri. After the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, the CEO of the financial platform elleXX wrote on LinkedIn that she had declined all media requests on the subject. “I don’t want to be wheeled out as an expert on all economic matters. Typical woman. Men were quick to respond.”

The problem after Laeri refused all those requests was that it was almost exclusively male experts who had their say in the reports on the CS crisis. The female perspective was largely missing. That’s a pity, because Laeri isn’t the only qualified woman economist in the country.

Three male mentions to one female

Anyone who regularly consumes media should at least sense that women are generally less represented than men. What’s surprising is how clear the figures on the media gender gap are, as evidenced by a 2021 study by the Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society (fög)¹. Women account for 23% of mentions in Swiss media. For every mention of a woman, there are about three mentions of men. This result holds true in all language regions and across all media types, write the study authors.

Depending on the topic, the differences can be even greater. While the share of women is somewhat higher for cultural (27%) and human-interest topics (31%), it is well below average when it comes to business issues (17%) and sports reporting (13%). According to the fög, this gender gap is not a uniquely Swiss phenomenon. The report refers to various international studies that show that women are less frequently quoted, interviewed and used as scientific experts.

Influence on perception

If women – and, for that matter, non-binary people and trans people² – are portrayed less frequently in the media, this may influence how society perceives these population groups. For example, the fög study goes on to say that women are attributed a lower expert status because they appear less often as experts in public debate. And because they are seen and heard less often, they are perceived less as experts – a classic vicious circle. The same applies to politicians who are not as strongly represented in the media: their chances of being nominated or elected for office are lower than those of people who are more present. These observations are based on two studies from 2016 and 2017 cited by the fög.

Fortunately, there are now various efforts under way that will hopefully lead to a reduction in the media gender gap in the medium to long term. A good example is the Ringier media group’s EqualVoice initiative. Launched in 2019, the initiative aims to increase the visibility of women in the media and give them the same voice as men. The so-called EqualVoice Factor, an algorithm specially developed by Ringier, measures mentions of women and men in the articles put out by individual media titles. Initially only online reports were analysed; since 2022, figures have also been collected for a number of print media produced by the publishing house, such as the Beobachter, the SonntagsBlick and the Handelszeitung. The results are to be used, among other things, to initiate a debate on the editorial teams.

So what can we do?

In our capacity as a communications agency, we also have a duty to help achieve a more balanced representation of women and marginalised groups. In our role as PR consultants, we should be encouraging our clients to deliberately also use female experts in media relations. Together with our client companies, we can prepare them for working with the media and position them systematically by offering them for interview.

We should also be paying attention to gender balance in our function as editors for customer/employee magazines and other corporate publications. It’s sometimes worth spending more time researching to find a suitable female expert for a specialised interview. Often, the search brings up male names first because these people have been quoted more often and are thus more present. It’s the same old vicious circle. Of course this doesn’t mean that there are no suitable females to provide information. We simply have to find them and make them visible.

1. Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society (fög), University of Zurich Yearbook Quality of the Media 3/2021; Darstellung von Frauen in der Berichterstattung Schweizer Medien (representation of women in Swiss media)
2. This text focuses primarily on the media representation of women. As the author, however, I would deliberately point out that the reporting of the Swiss media overall should become more diverse and inclusive.