Women are not equally represented in media ?

Whether it’s in the newsroom, Hollywood, in front of the camera or behind it, women are not equally represented in media:

Around the world, women are far less likely than men to be seen in the media. As subjects of stories, women only appear in a quarter of television, radio, and print news. In a 2015 report, women made up a mere 19% of experts featured in news stories and 37% of reporters telling stories globally.

The media industry is just one-third women, a number that only decreases for women of color.

In the broadcast news sector alone, work by women anchors, field reporters and correspondents is only 25.2 percent.

In 2017, women penned 37 percent of bylined news articles and opinion pieces about reproductive issues in the nation’s 12 most widely circulated newspapers and news wires.

Women accounted for just 17 percent of all the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors who worked on the top-grossing 250 domestic films of 2016.

When there are more women behind the camera or at the editor’s desk, the representation of women onscreen is better: Films written or directed by women consistently feature a higher percentage of female characters with speaking roles.

Women have never accounted for more than 33 percent of speaking roles in the top 100 films in any given year for the past decade. Only 4.3 percent of directors on 1,100 top films in the past decade were women.

After watching “Women and Media: What Will It Take”, a full panel discussion about the representation of women in the media industry itself.     

• Do you agree with the panelists in the video? Why/why not?
• For men in the industry, what do you think the solution may be to empower them to change how many women work in the industry in leadership and how women are portrayed in leadership roles in the media?
• What was your biggest takeaway from the panel discussion?
• What are the issues with social media for women?
  

  Challenges faced by women on social media

  Women are the most vulnerable to cyber abuse like online harassment.Increased attention of women in social media often makes them the target of repressive activities.

• How men and women view things differently?
  

  Men have 25% higher levels than women of testosterone receptors in their visual cortexes, where images are processed. As a result, their visual systems are better able than those of women to perceive changes in brightness across space, such as recognizing faces or reading letters from an eye chart.