NOBODY WOULD DARE to deny the influence of mass media in the public perception of reality. In short, if it is not in the news, it does not exist. It is therefore key that women are fairly represented. Data are not very encouraging, though, even if 60% of the students in Communication are female, and they prevail in newsrooms.
A CLOSE ANALYSIS of more than 50 newspapers, digital media, television broadcasters and publishing houses reveals that women do not make it to the top jobs. Just one of them, Rosario Martín Cabiedes, presides Europa Press news agency – owned by her family. This is just 6% of all media groups’ presidents. The lowest the ranks in the hierarchy, the more seats are occupied by women: they are 15% of CEO’s and 14% of media editors.
DIGITAL-NATIVE platforms maintain old school ways: only three in 25 media -El Huffington Post, Que.es and Republica.com- have a female editor (12%, two percentage points below the average). They follow the same pattern as their print predecessors, where only two newspapers (Expansión and La Nueva España) are led by a woman. The situation is much worse in TV, with just 9% of the senior positions held by women (three out of 33).
Source: Comunication Book
"All members in RTVE's Directive Committee are men"
PREVENTING WOMEN to access those jobs “deprives girls and young women of female power roles they could identify themselves with”, says Pilar López, expert in communication with a gender perspective. To avoid this, López suggests that the Gender Equality Law is completed with sanctions for the non-complying media. She criticizes public corporations: “Discrimination has not been counteracted, the gender gap is even wider”, in spite of the RTVE's (Spain’s public broadcaster) Equality Plan, which sets as a goal “promoting women’s incorporation to the senior positions”. RTVE’s website shows that all of the members in the corporation’s Directive Committee are men, while three of the nine directors in the board are women.
ANOTHER GOAL in the public broadcaster's equality plan is “[to] properly reflect women’s presence in different spheres of social life”. Nonetheless, this does not seem to be a great concern for media, and TV more specifically. A report by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) for 2015 reveals that women are 70% of TV presenters, but they do not reach the top jobs, and have a very limited career in front of the camera - not so for their male colleagues: women on the screen belong mainly to the 35 to 49 age group, while men prevail in the 50 to 64 age group. The report also unveils that, when women are a news report source, they appear as housekeepers in 75% of the cases, while only 33% of female sources are academic experts, 26% are political spokespersons and 3% are managers or businesswomen. To help prevent this kind of situations, certain initiatives have arisen: Plataforma de Expertas keeps a database of more than 300 women specialised in different topics or areas in a free database for journalists. “There is none” will no longer be an excuse for not quoting a woman as a source.