Sex Symbol or Housewife? Ask your TV monitor!

On February 16 2005, thousands of activists and researchers monitored radio and television news bulletins and newspapers in 102 countries in the biggest ever monitoring of gender representation in the news.

Anna Turley, co-ordinator of GMMP 2005, during TV news monitoring in London

"Media content still reflects a masculine vision of the world and of what is important," said Anna Turley, the coordinator of the Global Media Monitoring Project. "Monitoring is part of the struggle to promote gender equality in and through the media."

The GMMP analyses the gender portrayal and stereotypes in the news and the participation of women journalists in the news production in the five continents.

It is run entirely by volunteers scrutinizing the world media on the same day using monitoring tools developed by the World Association for Christian Communication, WACC, which has coordinating the large-scale study.

"The global nature of the research means that it is possible to identify trends which could otherwise be dismissed in national studies," said the UK GMMP coordinator Karen Ross from the University of Coventry.

This, the third, GMMP explores news features from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The findings will be analysed by the South-African NGO Media Monitoring Project.

"The reports will be used to establish a dialogue with the media and develop advocacy campaigns, guidelines and policies for a more gender-sensitive reporting," Anna Turley said. "This GMMP will be more advocacy-oriented." 

Not only academics but activists and journalists participated in the monitoring. "I can really see now when deconstructing these stories how journalists miss an opportunity when they ignore the gender dimensions in the story," said an African monitor.

Newspaper monitoring at WACC for GMMP 2005

"If we, as researchers, are to offer anything to society other than the occasional published research paper which three other people ever read, it is precisely to make our research accessible to a wider public, a wider citizenry," academic Karen Ross told IPS. "We should bleed out into the real world of real women's real lives."

"Even when female journalists wrote stories, the gender angle was completely missed in the report," Judith Smith from the Southern African Media and Gender Institute (SAMGI), which coordinated the 13-people South Africa monitoring group.

"If it is a women's issue, it is a non-issue. And non-issues constitute non-news," monitor Lizette Rabe from Stellenbosch University in South Africa said.

"We are so used to these stereotypes that it needs a media monitoring project to make us aware of the discrepancies between the media and the 'real' society in South Africa," a participant said.

The GMMP global and regional reports will be released by the end of 2005. What we can say now is that GMMP has been a huge empowerment exercise for those who took part in the coding. Or, as Maria Elena Hermosilla from WACC in Chile puts it: "Communication empowering women, women empowering communication."

For more information see: http://www.globalmediamonitoring.org