... or how I learned to embrace feminism and accept my place in the awkward squad

Ten years ago, in 1994, I embarked on what was to become a significant research interest for me when I decided to monitor the media’s portrayal of the contest for the leadership of the British Labour Party, a contest provoked by the sudden death of the then leader, John Smith.

Of the three contenders, one – Margaret Beckett – was a woman, and even a very cursory analysis of press coverage showed clear, and I would argue, irrevocably biased differences in reporting, both in terms of content and in terms of slant. The following two quotes provide excellent examples of the kinds of gender bias present in press reporting at that time:

Mr Blair is a man of rare ability…he has an unblemished reputation for honesty and integrity that commands the respect even of his most committed opponents…he is happily married to Cherie Booth…and they have three children…Blair is a devoted and active father….committed to family values. (The Daily Mail, 13 May 1994)

Deputy leader Margaret Becket, 51, has failed to make an impact inside or outside the Commons …since her election as deputy, and has even been ridiculed for her lack of fashion sense…Labour should dump the gruesome and insincere Beckett and replace her with John Prescott….(The Sun, 13 May 1994).

Ten years on, journalists continue to be intemperate and sexist in their reporting and Margaret Beckett has since become a serial apologist for Tony Blair’s Labour (allegedly) government. But what has changed over the past decade is the number of feminist media researchers who are now bringing a fiercely critical eye to all things media, both in terms of the representation of women in news but also the location of women in news industries. To be sure, there have been feminist scholars researching the media for many years but the past decade has seen the development of a substantial body of feminist media scholarship which constitutes a significant body of work, of a wealth of herstory, upon which to build. The establishment of gender-based sections within the principal academic communication associations, such as the Feminist Scholarship Division (International Communication Association) and the Gender and Communication Section (International Association of Media and Communication Research), as well as the more recent launch of the Women’s Media Studies Network (Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association – UK) are an important part of this coming to voice. The successful launch of a new journal, Feminist Media Studies (Taylor and Francis) in 2000, also signalled an important shift in the academic zeitgeist, making clear, again, that gender-based analyses were an integral part of media research. And what has helped to both establish and sustain this developing area of scholarship has been the availability of large-scale datasets on gender and representation which have provided the quantitative muscle to complement the qualitative flavours of smaller-scale studies.

A year after my first foray into the research world of gender and media representation, I took part in the first Global Media Monitoring Project in 1995. I was one of a small team of British researchers and the coding work I undertook for GMMP95 easily confirmed what I already knew from my earlier study. Women appear in the news media in a narrow and mostly negative range of roles, as victims, as mothers, as prostitutes, as eye candy. In 2000, I was co-ordinator for the UK’s GMMP effort and responsible for the English part of that study. The day chosen for GMMP2000 was the day on which the verdict came out on Harold Shipman, the doctor who had been accused and subsequently convicted of killing some of his patients, many of whom were older women: it was widely believed that he had killed hundreds of people over the years he had been practising as a family doctor. Whilst the Shipman verdict dominated the British news media on the day and thus skewed the monitoring data, it was nonetheless noticeable that excluding that one exceptional news story, the ways in which women were portrayed in other stories were remarkably similar to the patterns observed from the 1995 study. In fact, the proportion of women featured in the news in 2000 was slightly less than in 1995. Whilst it was incredibly sad for those of us involved in GMMP2000 to realise that the situation for women in the media had actually got worse over the previous five years, it was only by actually having comparative data to work with, comparative both across time and across geographies, that we could recognise that reality. As importantly, the geographical spread and quantitative nature of the comparative data which have emerged from the two GMMP studies so far, makes our analysis, inference and interpretation of their meaning significantly less vulnerable to the kinds of attack we regularly experience against our smaller-scale researches. Building arguments informed by date from 70 or so countries around the globe, involving literally thousands of individual news items generated by a variety of different news media and all coded using the same instrument, compels those arguments be taken seriously.

I was thinking about all this when a small group of us got together in the closing months of 2003, to discuss who and what we should be putting forward as our nominations for a series of awards to be made by the International Communication Association (ICA). For a long time, all the academic media and communication associations have been dominated by men and by male concerns. Admittedly, a few women have been elected to the top jobs, and some have even won awards, but women’s victories are still noteworthy, they still provoke a gasp of, ‘gosh, a woman’s got it’ when the name is announced, it is still extraordinary for women to win these battles. So, this time around, our small group, all members of the Feminist Scholarship Division of ICA, decided to see if we could nominate women for all the awards. We canvassed opinion amongst our colleagues and peers and agreed our nominations. I nominated the Global Media Monitoring Project for the award of ‘most important applied/public policy programme’ and, once GMMP had secured the nomination, I was then responsible for putting the nomination package together. I wrote to a number of international scholars, including several who have been significantly involved in previous GMMP studies and in the end, I received letters of endorsement from 10 scholars. Here are some of the things they said about the value of GMMP:

I had the privilege to coordinate the GMMP in Guatemala in both 1995 and 2000, and will be involved again in 2005. I have found GMMP to be a bold and innovative project that involves grassroots leaders in social research, often for the first time, and helps them to connect the dots between research, media advocacy and public policy. (Dennis A. Smith, Coordinator, Publications and Communication Training, Central American Evangelical Centre for Pastoral Studies (Cedepca)

The 1995 Global Media Monitoring Project, among other feminist initiatives for the UN Women’s Conference on gender and media, gave us huge inspiration and encouragement. We adopted the methodology of the Global Media Monitoring Project to conduct a first-ever survey on established newspapers’ coverage of women and men in 1997. The findings of this survey were widely used by women activists, journalists, and academics to reveal gender bias and segregation, and to advocate for gender sensitization in Chinese news media. Feng Yuan, Co-coordinator of Media Monitor Network For Women and Assistant to Editor-in-Chief of China Women’s News (daily)

The project is immensely valuable for teachers and researchers in media studies around the world. Current academic knowledge about media representations is predominantly based on the situation in western industrialised countries. The GMMP adds significantly to that knowledge and has produced a more diverse perspective on gender and media, in which cultural differences in images and reception are acknowledged. (Liesbet van Zoonen, Professor in Media and Popular Culture, University of Amsterdam)

By the time this year’s ICA conference takes place in late May 2004, we will know if GMMP has won the award. If it is successful, then we will have the satisfaction of knowing that a small community of our peers have judged it against their own set of criteria and against the entries of the other candidates, and found it to be the most worthy. If it doesn’t win, then we won’t be going to New Orleans to shake the hand of the ICA President, but we will still continue our work on GMMP2005, GMMP2010 and further, because we know its value, even if others are less perceptive. But here’s hoping…..

By Dr Karen Ross

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