Who makes the news? Global Media Monitoring Report 2015

Two decades after the Beijing Platform for Action identified the media as one of the "priorities for action in advancing gender equality and women’s human rights”, the Global Media Monitoring Project by WACC monitors and assesses improvements in this filed, by presenting a worldwide picture on the quality of news content with regard to tendencies for gender stereotyping, absence or presence of a rights’ focus, centrality of women in the stories and trends in highlighting gender equality or inequality concerns. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) takes stock of changes in dimensions of gender in the world news media content since 1995.

The Fifth GMMP assesses change over the past two decades, from 1995 to 2015, based on data collected from 114 countries and including analyses of global, regional as well as national patterns.

Among the key findings, GMMP 2015 reveals that the rate of progress towards media gender parity has almost ground to a halt over the past five years. In 2015, women make up only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news, exactly as they did in 2010. The gap is even wider in news about politics and government, in which women are only 16% of the people in the stories. The benefits deriving from digital technologies have a limited impact when it comes to improving the balance in representation and participation of women in media: only 26% of the people in Internet news stories and media news Tweets combined are women. When it comes to assessing the quality of contents presented in media, only 4% of stories clearly challenge gender stereotypes, a one percentage point change since 2005. A synthesis of the main findings is provided in the Highlights of Findings, available here .