The treatment of women in the media reflects that found in wider society – if it’s not even worse; take all the many television discussion programmes made up exclusively of male pundits, the dubious jokes and sometimes crass sexism sprinkled on-air and in print, and the unequal pay of press professionals.
Denouncing the pervading macho environment in the French media, a new collective of French women journalists called Prenons la Une (a play on words roughly translated as Take the Lead), presented their manifesto earlier this week, supported with the signatures of more than 400 women and men media professionals. “We, women journalists, can stand no longer the sexist clichés that are spread across front-cover headlines,” reads the manifesto (see the page on tumblr ). “Why, still so often, reduce women to sexual objects, housewives or hysterical beings? Through this imbalance, the media participate in the transmission of sexist stereotypes, whereas they should, on the contrary, represent society in all of its composition.”
The collective points to lead story headlines like that, now infamous, one which appeared in October 2012 on the front cover of weekly news magazine L’Express. Set above a photo of President François Hollande beside a montage of pictures of women (his former partner, his then-partner, his socialist rival, a Green party minister and German Chancellor Angela Merkel), it ran: ‘These women who ruin his life’.
There are so many offending examples that can be cited across the media. Take the headline published last September by regional daily La Voix du Nord, introducing an article about a demonstration in Lille by women campaigning to raise awareness of rape crimes, ran: ‘They didn’t choose to be raped, and they shout it out loud’. Could it be imagined that there is a choice in the matter?
Covering the recent Olympic Games in Sochi for French state TV group France Télévisions, sports commentator Nelson Monfort and former French ice-skating champion Philippe Candeloro offered no end of sexist observations: take Candeloro’s live commentary on the performance of a female Italian ice-skater, he says: “Ah, she has a lot of charm Valentina, a bit like Monica Belluci. Perhaps a little less breast, but anyway.” Talking about another female competitor, Candeloro comments: “In 2006 I made a small comment about her pretty little backside”, to which his Montfort adds: “Her morphology hasn’t changed much”.
Or take veteran French TV chat show host Thierry Ardisson, who just last weekend commented on air that “a woman presenting a rugby programme is like a man who puts on hydrating cream”.
In a video recently posted on the website of French news weekly Le Point, one of its journalists, Frédéric Lewino, explained: “Since the creation of Le Point, we’ve always had the luck of having women political correspondents who are not only excellent but also gorgeous.”
Beyond these sexist caricatures lies a stark injustice in the lack of representation of women in the media is . “In broadcast debates and in newspaper columns, women make up just 18% of invited experts,” the collective’s manifesto underlines. “Other women who are interviewed are all too often presented as simple eye-witnesses or victims, without family names or professions.”
The over representation of men in the media has been quantified in recent research, notably in two edifying studies by France’s broadcast media watchdog, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA) published last October.
It monitored a large part of television and radio broadcasting in France during the whole of the first quarter of 2013, which included the national TV networks TF1, France 2, France 3, Canal+, Arte et M6, TV rolling news stations BFM TV, iTélé and LCI, and national radio stations RMC, RTL, France Info, France Inter. “The share of women taking part in those [television] news programmes analysed is less than 20% (compared to more than 80% for men) whatever the type of medium (general public networks, news channels, general public stations),” reported the CSA. “This share is even less concerning radio (less than 17%).”
An under-representation of women was also found by the CSA in TV debate and current affairs analysis programmes and chat shows, such as Le Grand Journal , Ce soir (ou jamais), Mots croisés , On n’est pas couché and C dans l’air . From its monitoring of these last year over a shorter period, from March 18th to March 31st, the CSA found that “across all the programmes analysed, the time given to women to speak (whatever their role in the programme broadcast) only represented 30% of all speaking time”.
Meanwhile, a blogger by the name of Cathy Hope last month reported how, over a period of one year, she monitored 246 broadcasts of an early morning studio interview programme broadcast on state radio station France Inter and found that overall just 16.26% of its guests were women.
Female journalists paid on average 12% less than men
But the problem does not only concern broadcasters. The Commission on the Image of Women in the Media (la Commission sur l’image des femmes dans les médias), a public body that is now part of the High Council for Equality Between Men and Women (Haut conseil à l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes), conducted a number of studies covering both broadcast and print media. In a 2011 report of its findings, it found exactly the same result as the CSA’s study: across both broadcast and print media, just 18% of all experts interviewed or invited to comment upon issues were women.
Like a vicious circle, the under-representation of women in the media helps reinforce the inequalities in wider society, which are largely the reason that there are fewer women present in studio debates or quoted in articles. In the political world, for example, and despite the gender parity law, there are fewer women than men.
Epoke Conseil, a French agency specialized in reporting on gender parity, has published for use by the media a guide to women experts, but it appears to be rarely consulted.
But there is also another aspect to the problem. Quite often, as journalists know well, women experts or politicians will decline to be interviewed on issues that they believe they are not sufficiently competent to commentate upon – a modesty that is comparatively rare among men. Because they carry out most of the domestic responsibilities, women are also less available for evening interviews.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
“Some male guest interviewees, thanks to them being well-known, have become accustomed to appearing on television,” the CSA said in its report last October. “They no doubt manage more easily to be given speaking time and to conserve it when faced with women less used to appearing on television and who therefore have more difficulty in imposing themselves in a debate.”
But the media are not an innocent reflection of society. They reinforce stereotypes and inequality as a reflex, by habit and by day-to-day machismo.
The problem is, of course, not limited to the French media. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) produces a worldwide survey every five years of gender representation in the media. Coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication, an NGO that promotes diversity of, and access to, the media, its surveys monitor media output during one same day. In the introduction to the results of its 2010 study of gender representation in the media of 108 countries, the GMMP reported that “only 24% of the people heard or read about in print, radio and television news are female."
"In contrast, 76% - more than 3 out of 4 – of the people in the news are male," it continued. "This is a significant improvement from 1995 when only 17% of the people in the news were women. However, despite a slow but overall steady increase in women’s presence in the news over the past 10 years, the world depicted in the news remains predominantly male. This picture is incongruent with a reality in which at least one half of the world’s population is female.”
"The proportion of female news subjects identified, represented or portrayed as workers or professionals over the past 10 years has risen in some occupational categories," the GMMP found. "The gap however remains high especially in the professions as depicted in the news. Further, out of 25 occupational categories, women outnumber men in only 2: news subjects presented as homemakers (72%) and those presented as students (54%). The picture seen through the news becomes one of a world where women are virtually invisible as active participants in work outside the home.”
The collective Prenons la Une believes that sexist treatment of women in the media is in part due to the inequalities within editorial teams. "These stereotypes are at the same time the cause and result of the professional inequalities, sexist talk and attitudes within editorial teams, but also because of the lack of raising journalists’ awareness of the issues,” says the collective’s manifesto. It underlines that in the French press an average of more than 70% of editors are men, and that women are paid on average 12% less than their male counterparts. “These inequalities are mechanically reflected in the contents of news reporting,” the manifesto adds. “How can what a woman expert has to say be given credibility when there is difficulty in recognizing the capacity of women journalists to become editorial heads?”
According to data from the French commission that authorises the issue of professional press cards, the Commission de la carte professionnelle des journalistes, just more than 40% of French journalists are women. According to a 2012 report by the French Observatory of Press Trades (l’Observatoire des métiers de la presse), 58% of short-term working contracts in the press are filled by women, while 53% of all freelance journalists are women.
The Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, an association whose principal mission is the defence of authors’ copyrights, last year carried out a survey on journalists’ earnings, in which more than 3,400 journalists took part, made up equally of men and women. “Women represented 62% of the lowest income earners (less than 20,000 euros per year) and only 16% of the highest (more than 100,000 euros per year)”, noted the association in its report of the findings.
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English version by Graham Tearse