Who Makes the News? Global Media Monitoring Project 2015

"The media are a powerful force in shaping how we see the world, what we think, and often how we act. They should be an example of gender equality....And yet the media is still, in large part, doing the opposite." - Getachew Engida, Deputy Director-General, UNESCO

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is a research and advocacy initiative for gender equality in and through the news media. Every five years since its inception in 1995, the GMMP has researched and documented changes in relation to gender in news media content across the globe. This set of global, regional, and country reports from the 2015 assessment provides analysis and case studies from 114 countries. They assess how far the vision for media gender equality has been achieved over the past two decades, and identify persistent and emerging challenges.

As stated in the Foreword of the Global Report, "the media - as both powerful institutions and power-defining mechanisms - are fundamental to the ways in which women's status and gender inequalities are reflected, understood and potentially changed. How women and men are represented in the media is therefore a key indicator of progress towards gender equality and the fulfilment of women's human rights."

The results are based on data gathered by volunteer teams in all 114 countries, who monitored 22,136 stories published, broadcast, or tweeted by 2,030 distinct media houses, written or presented by 26,010 journalists, and containing 45,402 people interviewed and/or subjects of the stories.

Among the key findings, GMMP 2015 reveals that the rate of progress towards media gender parity has almost ground to a halt over the past five years. In particular, the results show that:

• Worldwide, women make up only 24% of the people heard, read about, or seen in newspaper, television, and radio news, exactly the same level found in 2010. Women's points of view are rarely heard in the topics that dominate the news agenda; even in stories that affect women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, it is the male voice that prevails. When women do make the news, it is primarily as "stars" or "ordinary people", not as authority figures.
• Women's relative invisibility in traditional news media has crossed over into digital news delivery platforms. Only 26% of the people in internet news stories and media news Tweets combined are women.
• There is a global glass ceiling for female news reporters in newspaper by-lines and newscast reports, with 37% of stories reported by women, the same as a decade ago.

"While the study has found a few excellent examples of exemplary gender-balanced and gender-sensitive journalism, it demonstrates an overall glaring deficit in the news media globally, with half of the world's population barely present."

The GMMP is a project of the World Association for Christian Communication with support from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The next assessment is expected to be concluded in 2020.