What to Consider If Your Newsroom Wants to Produce More Gender-Equitable Coverage
Newsrooms have a diversity problem. Most United States newsrooms, overall, are less diverse than working class Americans. About 61 percent of newsroom employees are male. This limited perspective could be one of the many factors behind the public’s trust in newsrooms being at an all-time-low: as the public craves more information and perspective on things that can affect their lives, 61 percent of the content they are consuming is written from the perspective of men. 50.5 percent of the United States population is female.
This is affecting all areas of the journalistic process. “Women are being underrepresented in news leadership, as protagonists in news gathering and news coverage, and fewer women tend to consume news,” said writer Luba Kassova. “There are [many] areas we need to get right if equitable journalism is to be produced.”
Kassova wrote a report entitled From Outrage to Opportunity: How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colors in News Leadership and Coverage, aimed at studying the limited role of women in media and trends over time. One major thing the study found: coverage of gender equality issues, such as coverage of the #MeToo movement and Hollywood hiring practices, has significantly declined since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Kassova also wrote that coverage of systemic issues facing women is negligible if it is reported on at all: only 1 in 5,000 stories mentions structural issues for women in detail. Only 1 in 200 stories mentions that barriers for women even exist.
“We cannot just measure gender equality through representation. We also have to look at how women are portrayed, if there is to be equitable coverage,” Kassova said. “There’s really a long way to go before women’s perspectives are heard in the news, [and] there is very little coverage about the structural issues that women face.”
Moreover, few women hold leadership positions in the media. Only around 21 percent of editors throughout major newsrooms in the world are women. This figure varies greatly from country to country (the number is around 7 percent in Brazil, but 50 percent in the United States). That figure falls even further when you consider business leadership positions within the newsroom (mostly executive roles). Just 10 percent of executive roles in newsrooms are held by women. “This culture of what constitutes a story is very male dominated,” Kassova said. “This is why it’s important to see who is editing the news.”
Kassova suggests that newsrooms looking to diversify the quality and quantity of their work can take actionable steps to make more room for gender-equitable coverage. “This is a great opportunity for news providers to produce more equitable coverage and attract more female audiences to reduce the consumption gap between men and women and grow their revenue.” Kassova said. “Just by hiring women the problem won’t be solved, there needs to be intervention at each part of the news value chain.”
The value chain involves asking questions like the following: What deserves to be reported on? Who is doing the reporting? How are they doing this reporting? Are they receiving input from marginalized members of the community in order to diversify their reporting? Does the newsroom actively engage with marginalized peoples in order to strengthen the quality of their work? And once the story has been written, does it perpetuate falsehoods or harmful stereotypes? Does it portray these communities reductively or simplistically? Was this story written for the majority (aka, white men) to consume, or was the audience carefully and critically targeted?
Asking and holding a newsroom accountable for these questions at each step of the journalistic process is crucial, says Kassova. “What underpins this gap are social norms and unless they are challenged, the gap will remain intact [and] not covered by journalists."
Several newsrooms have created their own checklists for both active journalists and newsrooms as a whole to follow to begin addressing these unequal underpinnings. Despite the resources being available, it is on each individual to keep an eye on more equitable practices—both for themselves and in the newsrooms they are working in—and apply pressure to work toward these practices.
