Miren Gutierrez interviews ELISA MUÑOZ, project coordinator of The Global Report on Women in the News Media
ROME, Jun 24 (IPS) – For the first time in 15 years, an organisation, the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), is attempting to measure the progress, or lack of progress, of women in media organisations globally.The IWMF is a global network dedicated to strengthening the role of women in media as a way to further worldwide freedom of the press.
Its report – to be released in 2010¬ is examining the structure of the news media industry worldwide from a gender angle.
In a previous article on the same issue, IPS found that women’s representation at the higher echelons of power in media organisations is very low, even in the best cases. For example, in Sweden three out of four leaders in the media industry are men, according to the 2007 report ‘The Gender of Journalism’, authored by Monika Djerf-Pierre.
In e-mailed and phone interviews from Washington, Project Coordinator Elisa Muñoz (also the director of research of the IWMF) spoke to IPS.
IPS: What are the premises of the research?
ELISA MUÑOZ: The IWMF is undertaking the most comprehensive international study ever conducted on the status of women in the news media. The study will sample 500-600 news organisations in some 66 nations (internet-only companies, news magazines and news agencies are not included). A previous study, ‘An Unfinished Story: Gender Patterns in Media Employment’, was published in 1995 by UNESCO. It was written by Margaret Gallagher, who is on our Research Task Force.
Conducted in 43 countries, Gallagher’s study found that in most countries women’s professional representation in the news and other branches of the media ranged from a high of around 30 percent down to the single digits, except in a few Nordic countries, where women were on par with men.
In our own study, we have refined the methodology (e.g., definitions of occupational categories) and evened out geographic representation.
