By Lavinia Mohr, Deputy General Secretary and Director of Programmes, WACC

		“The media have enormous potential to foster gender equality, but they tend to perpetuate negative portrayals of women, focusing for the most part on their physical or emotional attributes and confining them all too often to stereotypical roles”, said Swiss parliamentarian Doris Stump at a hearing on combating sexist stereotypes in the media held in Paris, March 24, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Equality Committee. She said, “The media have a key part to play in shaping individual identities, particularly among young people, and the constant clichés purveyed by the media become rooted in the collective sub-conscience, casting each gender in a fixed role.”
Swiss parliamentarian, Doris Stump

The hearing concluded that the first step, however, is to ensure media coverage of women. According the Council of Europe’s news report on the hearing, “they are patently under-represented. In Europe, women do not make the news; they appear in only 21% of news on average, and when they do, it is mainly because of their celebrity, not their skill or expertise.” Lavinia Mohr, WACC’s Director of Programmes, informed the hearing about the findings of WACC’s 2005 Global Media Monitoring Project including the striking disparity found between the proportion of women in Europe’s parliaments and the proportion of female politicians in news coverage in Europe. The proportion of women in Europe’s parliaments was 24%, but only 13% of politicians in the news were female.

Brigitte Grèsy, rapporteur of the French Committee on the Image of Women in the Media and member of the Board of the European Union’s Institute for Gender Equality, told the hearing that the French public radio station, France Inter, grants on average 27% of its speaking time on air to women and 73% to men. On French television, women are on screen for 37% of the time and men for 63%, while speaking times are 32% for women and 68% for men.

“It is essential to redress this imbalance and combat all forms of sexism in the media. This implies enlisting the help of a whole series of stakeholders including media professionals, authorities, audiovisual regulators and civil society to devise codes of good practice and promote an editorial line which takes account of gender issues”, said Ms Stump.

Pamela Morinière, Programme Officer for Gender Equality Projects with the International Federation of Journalists, told the hearing that their members are concerned about the impact of their work and support a code of good practice widely recognised in the profession. However, time pressures and other conditions under which they work can lead to problems. She mentioned several IFJ initiatives to promote gender equality in journalism. Last year’s publication of a book on ethical journalism for editors, programme makers and journalists is an important effort. She told the hearing that the IFJ is “very proud” of the Portraying Politics Toolkit on Gender and Television which is used in journalism schools. Both initiatives draw on the evidence produced by the Global Media Monitoring Project which Ms Morinière said was “very important because it has the only figures available” for a large number of countries and “it needs to be expanded to more countries.”

The Committee plans to draft resolutions and recommendations that will be addressed to the forty seven member states of the Council of Europe after their adoption by the Parliamentary Assembly.

(With excerpts from a news report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/NewsManager/EMB_NewsManagerView.asp?ID=4497)

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Networking websites