Media is a male business

Last week Nordicom published a fact sheet that was quite revealing. The 100 largest media corporations are so lagging behind when it comes to gender equality on the top levels. Thirty corporations have no women whatsoever in their top management.

We wanted to publish these statistics in good time before CSW62, the UN Commisson on the Status of Women March 12-23.
Only 15 percent of all UN member states are collecting sex-disaggregated data on the media, so how will we ever know if there is progress or not?

This year the CSW Priority theme is challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls. The the review theme is participation in and access of women to the media, and information and communications technologies and their impact on and use as an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women.
I will participate as a member of the official Swedish delegation from March 11-16, maybe I will meet some of you there?

Gendered ageism in the media buzz

I am proud and happy to promote my last scientific publication:

Visibility patterns of gendered ageism in the media buzz: a study of the representation of gender and age over three decades. The article is a result of a long time project, trying to capture the accumulated media images of gender and age.
The first data collection/report was done already in 1994 with my fellow colleague Maria Jacobson and since then we have continued to collect data and shared our findings about the media buzz.
Thanks to AgeCap, Centre for Ageing and Health at the University of Gothenburg I have now been able to explore the topic further. Please read and share if you find it interesting. It is open access and free to download.
Edström, Maria (2018) Visibility patterns of gendered ageism in the media buzz: a study of the representation of gender and age over three decades. Feminist Media Studies 18(1) p 77-93.
In my current project I am interviewing journalists on how to avoid stereotyping older people, keep you posted.

Comparing Gender and Media Equality Across the Globe

What if we could compile global, comparable sex-disaggregated data on the news media and make it into an open database?

That is exactly what we are working on in a research project at the University of Gothenburg.

Thanks to the Swedish Research Council and professor Monika Djerf-Pierre this data base is about to come true. In the project Comparing Gender and Media Equality Across the Globe we have collected data from the IWMF-study, The Global media Monitoring Project reports and the EIGE-study on the media sector and combined it with other global statistics.  We are now in the phase of running the data, making quality checks and doing first analysis of the material. The picture is from our second project meeting in October 2018, gathering in the front row: Sarah Macharia, WACC, Karen Ross, University of Newcastle, Claudia Padovani, University of Padova and in the back row Monika Djerf Pierre, Maria Edström and Mathias Färdigh. 

here is an article about the project from our first meeting.

In 2019 the GEM data base will be open for anyone to use.Then we will also launch our book, published by Nordicom. Keep you posted.