Andreea Papuc* reports on the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia which has found too few women’s voices in the Australian media.
Women make up half of the population, yet you wouldn’t know that from their representation in Australia’s media.
Women accounted for 34 per cent of direct quotes and 24 per cent of indirect sources in mainstream digital media sites, according to a report commissioned by the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia titled You Can’t Be What You Can’t See.
It also found women were largely absent from photographs and were under-represented in opinion pieces and columns.
“Women make up 50.7 per cent of the population but the stories which appear in the media do not reflect that reality,” said authors Jenna Price, a journalism lecturer, and Anne Maree Payne, a research assistant, at the University of Technology Sydney.
“The media reality is that women are not experts, not sources.”
The report examined the top five stories on 15 news sites — including the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, the ABC, as well as BuzzFeed and Daily Mail Australia — last October on four consecutive Thursdays, typically a day of high traffic with big audiences.
In February, it analysed the top five opinion pieces on each site for one week.
Female sources
Female journalists were more likely to use female sources (40 per cent) than male journalists (24 per cent), the report said.
“What do we read when we enter the top space of those websites?” the authors asked in the report.
“We read stories about men, by men.”
Among other findings, men were the majority of direct and indirect sources across all story topics with the exception of those relating to celebrities and the royals.
Men constituted 95 per cent of direct sources in sports-related stories, 82 per cent in business and finance stories and 79 per cent in law, crime and justice stories.
Jun Bei Liu, a portfolio manager at Tribeca Investment Partners in Sydney and a frequent commentator on the financial markets, said that women are only limiting themselves by not stepping forward to have their expert views heard.
“Sometimes we feel the world is against us as women — the daily grind and glass ceilings, and we shy away from challenges before even beginning them,” said Liu in an interview with Bloomberg when asked to comment on the report’s findings.
“It’s important to know that often these are mere perceptions and men in most cases feel the same.”
* Andreea Papuc is Real Estate and Investing Editor for Bloomberg News. She tweets at @ACPapuc.
This article first appeared at www.bloomberg.com.
