About us
Women’s Views on News (WVoN) is a UK-focussed women’s news, opinions and current affairs site, operating on a not-for-profit basis set up in January 2010 by founder Alison Clarke.
In 2010, according to the five-yearly Global Media Monitoring Project, women were under-represented in terms of news content:
- Only 13 per cent of all stories focus specifically on women.
- Only 6 per cent of stories highlight issues of gender equality or inequality.
- 46 per cent of stories reinforce gender stereotypes, almost eight times higher than stories that challenge such stereotypes (6 per cent ).
- Stories by female reporters are visibly more likely to challenge stereotypes than those filed by male reporters and are also less likely to reinforce stereotypes than those reported by men.
- Only 10 per cent of stories quote or refer to relevant local, national, regional or international legal instruments on gender equality and/or human rights.
More recently, figures compiled from a variety of sources by UK Feminista showed that:
- Just 23 per cent of reporters on national daily newspapers in the UK are women with only 1 female editor of a national daily.[43]
- Only 24per cent of news subjects (the people in the news) across global news channels are female and only 6 per cent of stories highlight issues of gender equality or inequality.[44]
- Women are under-represented in the creation of news. Only 22.6 per cent of reporters on national daily newspapers in the UK being women.[45]
- Women reporters are more likely to report women as the subjects of their stories than are men and are more likely to challenge, and less likely to reinforce, stereotypes in their reports than male reporters.[46]
- Research on UK media found that men typically outnumber women as ‘experts’ by 4:1 on major TV and radio programmes across channels.[47]
- 50 per cent of women in survey of 327 reported experience of sex discrimination in the last 5 years and 23% had experienced sexual harassment in that period.[48]
Our aim is to redress the gender imbalance in UK-focussed news reporting by telling the stories that the mainstream press ignores, and support and publicise campaigns and issues connected to women’s rights.
UK Feminista refs:
[43] Sedghi, Ami & Cochrane, Kira (2011, 6 Dec) ‘Women’s representation in media: who’s running the show?’, The Guardian [blog]. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/dec/06/women-representation-media; Martinson, Jane (2012, 31 May) Why are there so few female national newspaper editors? The Guardian [blog], http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/may/31/female-newspaper-editors
[44] Global Media Monitoring Project (2010) Who Makes the News? Highlights, p3. http://whomakesthenews.org/images/stories/restricted/highlights/highlights_en.pdf
[45] Sedghi, Ami & Cochrane, Kira (2011, 6 Dec) ‘Women’s representation in media: who’s running the show?’, The Guardian [blog]. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/dec/06/women-representation-media
[46] Global Media Monitoring Project (2010) Who Makes the News? Highlights, p3. http://whomakesthenews.org/images/stories/restricted/highlights/highlights_en.pdf
[47] Martinson, Jane (2012, 6 Mar) ‘Channel 4 and Sky News sign the equality pledge – but what about the BBC?’, The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/mar/06/bbc-should-sign-equality-pledge
[48] WFTV (2012) ‘WFTV Member Survey on Sex Discrimination and Sexual Harassment: Results Revealed at BAFTA Debate on Sexism’ [webpage]. http://www.wftv.org.uk/news/wftv-member-survey-sex-discrimination-and-sexual-harassment-%E2%80%A8results-revealed-bafta-debate