WACC Sets Next Global Media
Monitoring Project for 2005

The World Association for Christian Communications' Women's Programme will again sponsor the Global Media Monitoring Project to track media portrayal of women in news. This is WACC's update on its efforts to organize the third worldwide monitoring project: GMMP 2005 will aim to demystify research and empower more NGOs to carry out their own research, create a widely usable but more refined research tool, produce an up to date research study useful for gender-sensitisation, education and training purposes, provide a tool for activists to lobby for more gender-sensitive communication policy, and to promote media literacy, solidarity and networking among women's communication groups. Whilst in many ways GMMP 2005 will be very similar to the previous studies in 1995 and 2000, there will also be various improvements that come with the advantage of hindsight provided by the experience of the earlier studies. GMMP 2005 will contain more qualitative analysis of the media situation - participants will be asked to supplement their reports with contextual information about the media situation in their countries. Discussions with previous GMMP participants on the pertinent gender and media concerns in their particular country will inform the design of the methodology for GMMP 2005, thus allowing for more relevant country results and therefore a more useful lobbying tool for participating groups. Building on the success of press conferences held after GMMP 2000 in a number of countries including Holland and Germany, monitoring groups will also be provided with instruction kits on calling press conferences and publicising national and global results. There are plans for a webpage to be set up before GMMP 3 to keep monitors informed on the progress of the project.

If you would like to participate in the next GMMP or have any suggestions for improving the monitoring process, please write to women@wacc.org.uk.

Media Tenor Study: U. S. Television News
Ignores Women; Only 14% Depicted Are Female

Media Tenor (www.mediatenor.com) looked at the evening news programs on CBS, ABC and NBC to determine the percentage of female protagonists in news stories in 2002.

All three programs came in with an average percentage of 14% female protagonists, compared to 86% males. There were no significant differences among the networks in this regard. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice led the top 10 with 45 appearances, followed by Senator Hillary Clinton (27) and the First Lady, Laura Bush (20). It took EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman a mere three appearances to make it into the top 10.

The picture looks even worse considering the issues about which the top female protagonists were consulted or to which they were connected In the context of the top issues, foreign affairs, out of 4,234 appearances of individuals, only 208 were women, an equally low 5% on all three networks.

Similarly, out of 1845 individual appearances in the context of political issues, women appeared only 115 times. In fact, the only top five issues in which women consistently beat the network average of 14% were crime (often as victims) and, surprisingly, business -- though with a 21% share, women in this context are still far from achieving parity. To more information on this study, e-mail r.mock@mediatenor.com.

Commentary: Sexist Language Usage Persists
Despite Years of Efforts to Stop It

Let's call it exclusionary language creep-the re-emergence of masculine words to describe people who may be female or male. Despite years of effort by women's groups, linguists and educators to encourage speakers of English to adopt words that are gender-neutral, they note, and lapse into lazy terminology that excludes women. This slippage is occurring even at major newspapers, where their executives should know better.

Overview: The 'Women in Print'
Movement and Its Status Today

"New Words Live," the non-profit sister organization of New Words bookstore in Cambridge Massachusetts, sought support from the Ford Foundation in August 2000 for a project to examine the crisis in the feminist bookstore and associated "women-in-print" communities.

The subsequent report found that while the book industry overall remains healthy, the entire sector of US and Canadian independent bookstores and book publishing is in a state of crisis. The crisis is particularly deep and consequential for feminist bookstores and their constituencies.

Feminist bookstores -- and the spaces, literal and metaphorical, that they offer -- are now endangered. The number of bookstores has plummeted: from about 120 feminist bookstores in the U.S. and Canada in the mid-1990s, to 85 in 1999, to 74 in 2001; a number of these are teetering on the brink of closing. Many large American cities that once had a women's bookstore are no longer served by one, including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Philadelphia, and Worcester. In California, there is no feminist bookstore south of Santa Cruz; in the state of Texas, only one feminist bookstore remains (in Austin); in the entire Southwest, the only feminist bookstore is in Tucson. New York City alone, in its heyday in the late 1970s, had three active, successful stores ("WomanBooks" on the upper West Side, "Djuna" in the Village, and "La Papaya" in Brooklyn); now, all of New York state has only one micro-store ("Bluestockings") in New York City, and "My Sister's Words" in Syracuse.

Longitudinal Analysis of Gender in Network Commercials:
How Advertisers Portray Gender

The researchers videotaped 21-hour constructed week primetime samples (Sunday through Saturday) for each network from 7:00 -10:00 p.m. CDT in 1998, 1999, and 2000. In 1998 the sample included ABC, CBS and NBC; in 1999 the sample was ABC, FOX; and in 2000, it was ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX. A total of 189 hours of television programming was collected during the February "sweeps" rating period each year.

Although smaller sample studies over the past 30 years have indicated that male-dominated advertising strategies exist, this three-year longitudinal analysis of primetime, major network commercials definitively documented that women are indeed underrepresented as mature central and secondary characters in all categories except traditionally female products. In fact, female representation in commercials has not changed much over the past 50 years; images of younger, sexually attractive, supportive women persist.

Age is as misrepresented in primetime, network commercials as gender. Confused consumer profiling still persists for both older women and older men. After 51 years of age, when a person has generally achieved financial security and independence, both genders were disregarded as target prospects by advertisers. However, mature, independent women were as egregiously overlooked in primetime, major network commercials as young girls under the age of five. These gaps in representation may undermine the credibility and desirability of aging for men and women - but especially women because they are so woefully misrepresented.

This study confirmed earlier studies' findings that the male voice is overwhelmingly the voice of authority in most commercials. We now know this is also true of commercials for traditionally female products. Perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising that male voices were also featured in longer commercials, while female voices were relegated to shorter commercials, but it was. Simply, women were usually featured in shorter commercials both as characters and voice-overs.

Photographs of African Women
in British Newspapers: Graffiti?

Two British newspapers The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian were deliberately chosen because each mirrors a political bias of the British society, both representing two polarized ends of the British politics - the conservative and the liberal. The Daily Telegraph has an inclination towards the Conservatives, a trend started by its previous owners such as Lord Hartell, while The Guardian, leans towards a liberal stance and was once known as "Britain's non-conformist conscience." Together with The Times, both newspapers also belong to the Britain's big three quality newspapers with very high circulation and readership.

Through a consistent monitoring of these newspapers lasting one year (January - December 2002), photographs of African women and men were collected. These are photographs indicative of the pattern of representation of Africa collected through a symptomatic rather than quantitative analysis of the photographs in the newspapers. A coding pattern for the photographs was developed using the dominant themes they portray. These themes were gleaned from the descriptive phrases/sentences (cutlines) that accompany the photographs and sometimes in the headlines and body of the written texts.

Guided by an examination of the photographs and the discussion held with the women groups, the researcher developed these categories to describe the photographs of African women: The beggars; happy foolish natives; beasts of burden; disease- infeste; grieving victims of crisis and disaster; political recluse.

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