I believe that there are still huge strides that need to occur to reverse the obvious gender bias in the media. A yearly report, called The Status of Women in the U.S. Media shows us that with many staggering statistics about the media today. The study goes over news, television, radio, sports journalism, film, video-games, social media, and more.
The report shows that gender representation by percentage in newspaper newsrooms has actually gone down, from being 36.9% women in 1999 to 36.3% in 2013, as shown by the graph shown.
In addition to that, men had three times as many page 1 quotes in The New York Times as woman did. This shows the direct link that media creator’s biases do really affect the media they create.
When we look at television, the results are just as troubling. As you can see below, even major Sunday talk show guest are 75% men. That’s crazy! No surpise then that the tally of TV station general managers was 17.8% in 2013 (and that is 1.5 percent down from 2012.)
In the 2012 Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report it was shown that only 14.6% of the total staff in the field of sports journalism were women, and only 9.6% of the sports editors were women.
In movies, you might think that they are getting better, due to the rise of female-driven movies like The Hunger Games and The Heat. Sorry, but you would be wrong. Out of the top 100 movies this year only two had female directors. They were the remake of Carrie and the Disney animated movie Frozen. That means that the 98 other movies were directed by only dudes, and did I mention that Frozen was directed by two people and the other director was male. There might be a small problem in this.
There were other good movies in 2013 directed by women like Enough Said, The To-Do List, In a World, and Blackfish, but they were all indie movies. Studios are not giving these talented directors large budget commercial films after they prove that they are good at what they do.
In other movie news, only 28.4 of characters in the top 100 movies of 2012 were women. In everyday life about 50% of people are women, but why not in movies? And when females are on screen, there is also a strong chance that they are sexualized or exposed. Yay, Hollywood (sarcasm.)
We can’t even find solace in Television, the former home of Tina Fey and Lucille Ball. The saddest thing about the next graph is nothing is to remember it never get past 25%.
In animation, it is the same way and they aren’t even hiring real actors. Animated children’s programing is literally drawing in inequality.
Not even actors are safe, and the public is fully aware of what they do. They are literally saying that top female actors are not worth as much as the top male actors.
Overall, the media has a long way to go when it comes to gender equality both in front of and behind the scenes, and the scariest statistics are that it is even getting worse. I hope that you would read the full report, as it is actually pretty interesting and is a lot more in depth than my post. It is at http://www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/2014-statistics.
Pop Culture with Jay 