To combat gender bias in political reporting and improve quality journalism, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its partners COPEAM and the University of Padova have launched a new training toolkit to support journalists and journalism students in producing more gender inclusive news reports when covering politics.
"When a journalist asked Prime Ministers Sanna Marin and Jacinda Ardern last year if the reason they met was because they were of similar age, we thought there was still a long way to go before sexist reporting is eradicated from political news coverage," said IFJ Gender expert Pamela Morinière. "Quality journalism should reflect the society that it is reporting. The way stories are selected and told should not be determined by the gender of their subjects."
Worldwide, women represent on average 25.6% of the members elected in parliaments (lower and upper houses), 30.4 % in Europe, and 44.5% in Nordic countries (2021), while they make only 18% of the government, politician, minister, or spokesperson interviewees in the news, according to the latest Global Media Monitoring Project released in 2020.
Working with frontline journalists, news media managers, journalists’ unions and associations, gender experts, media self-regulatory bodies, women active in political life, academics and, crucially, the next generation of media professionals, the IFJ- led project- Rewriting the Story seeks to initiate reforms in European media with regard to newsroom culture, policies and processes with regard to gender portrayal of women and men in political and public life.
One important aspect of the project is the development of training modules aimed at training journalists and journalism students. Following two series of training sessions with European journalists, the modules are now made available to the public fee of charge.
“These training modules aim to raise awareness about how gender biases, from the most blatant stereotypes to the most subtle gender stereotypes, can occur at each stage of the news production process. We have tried to give these an easy, global relevance that can be easily replicated across the globe," said Marie Palmer, IFJ trainer and author of the training toolkit.
The training modules are composed of five key components :
1) understanding the qualitative and quantitative underrepresentation of female politicians in the media,
2) exploring issues such as gender newsworthiness,
3) framing a story through a gender lens and understanding the challenges facing women in positions of leadership where expectations are framed in exclusively masculine terms,
4) exploring the power of language choice, and
5) Decoding multimodality and visual semiotics. All these modules are tackled with an intersectionality angle to ensure all aspects of discrimination against women are taken into account.
A sixth component looks into training skills and tips to run the training.
The training modules and supporting research material are available on the AGEMI web site -a platform aimed at enhancing gender equality in the media- to support other journalists' trainers' skills across the world.
The IFJ and its affiliates will now organise a series of national trainings in 11 EU member states using the toolkit. To subscribe to a training, interested journalists may contact the IFJ.
Rewriting the story is a two-year an EU- funded project bringing together the IFJ and its affiliates in Europe, as well as co-partners, the University of Padova and COPEAM (Conference of the Mediterranean Audiovisual Operators)
Download the toolkit here.
More about the project here.