As a journalist with a career spanning more than 35 years, and a lecturer and an academic in journalism, it’s fair to say Jenna Price is familiar with Australia’s media landscape. Even still, she was surprised by some of the findings in her most recent project examining the subject.
The Women’s Leadership Institute Australia 2019 Women for Media Report: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’, was undertaken by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney, supported by the Trawalla Foundation, and took a snapshot of Australia’s most influential news sites on four consecutive Thursdays in October 2018.
It is just a glimpse, “a very small sample of a bigger picture” but it gives an idea of what’s going on in Australian news.
The 15 news sites included The Australian, The Guardian, ABC, The Herald-Sun, The Daily Mail, Yahoo7, 9News, BuzzFeed, The West-Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
The results show that women are, largely, missing. We might make up 50.7% of the population but that is not reflected in the media, particularly not in opinion pieces and columns, and especially not in politics and business.
Across the data set from all of the sites analysed, the by-lines approached an equal gender split.
The report shows the average representation of female sources was just over one-third. Only the stories on one news site quoted more women than men; and that was Buzzfeed Australia.
Of the rest, the next best was 9News with women representing 45% of the sources quoted but at the other end sits the Australian Financial Review, where women made up only 14% of sources.
The question of why this matters, is easily answered: We can’t be what we can’t see.
If men are framed as experts in the media, it becomes accepted that men are experts. Conversely, if women are absent and not framed as experts that perception can quickly become the reality.
Increasing the representation of women as sources is a change Price says requires journalists and editors to actively seek out diversity in the sources they quote and publish, but it also requires women to say yes when they’re asked to comment.
Coaching women into their ability to be a source is time consuming but an absolutely necessary endeavour. “I do think it’s part of my responsibility as a journalist,” Price says.
Ensuring more women are comfortable being quoted and regarded as experts is a quantum cultural shift that won’t happen overnight.
Both the Australian Financial Review and The Australian had close to gender parity in the representation of male and female journalists on the top five new stories. But 90% of the opinion pieces in the data set from the Fin were written by men and 84% of the opinion pieces in The Australian were authored by males.
These figures indicate that the institutional work environments need to be considered: perhaps it is more than individual choices made by journalists that creates this disparity.
Price admits that structural factors and individual choices need to be scrutinised.
If more journalists and editors take this research on board and implement change as a result Price will be satisfied.