Gender in the news, revisited : tackling global and Austrian/German findings from the 1970s to the 2000s

Abstract

The news media are still contributing to gender inequality despite the fact that from the 1970s onwards, together with the second wave of the womens movement, gender equality has been on the news media agenda as a result of a series of directives and recommendations for news media from UNESCO in 1979, the Council of Europe in 1985, and the United Nations 4th Womens World Conference at Beijing in 1995. The news media participate in doing gender through recognition or misrecognition of a realistic image of women in news reportage. In addition, under-representation of women in the media should be seen as a form of symbolic violence. The present article traces the (under-)representation of women in news coverage from the 1970s through the first decade of the 21st century both on a global level, discussing the four monitoring results of the Global Media Monitoring Project (1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010) and, on a more regional level, those in Germany and Austria.