Week 5 – Policy and Advocacy
Claudia Padovani
Media Gender Equality Regimes
Associate professor Claudia Padovani invites the viewer to reflect on some conceptual and theoretical aspects of the connection between gender equality and policy, and how this provides a more comprehensive understanding of the different gender inequalities in media and its intersectionality with other aspects of identity.
Watch Video
Elena Pavan
Media, Advocacy Tools and Initiatives
Assistant professor Elena Pavan talks about the roles that media plays when it comes to initiatives advocating for gender equality, empowering or constraining movements.
Watch Video
Elena Pavan
Media as Spaces of Advocacy
Assistant professor Elena Pavan talks about the ways the media offers new spaces for action, influencing the organization, action repertoires and collective identity formation of different initiatives to fight gender inequality, reflecting on existing campaigns.
Watch Video
Week 4 – Technological Innovation
Karen Ross
Shifting the Discourse through Digital Means
The video considers some examples of the ways in which individuals, women’s groups and activists are challenging sexism in language use.
Watch Video
Sara de Vuyst
Gender and Digital Technologies: Unicorns (pt. 1)
PhD Sara De Vuyst discusses the value of digital skills in journalism and explores how digital skills are gendered.
Watch Video
Sara de Vuyst
Gender and Digital Technologies: Unicorns (pt. 2)
PhD Sara De Vuyst continues reflecting on how gender stereotypes play a role limiting the opportunities for women in tech.
Watch Video
Sara de Vuyst
Gender Issues in Data Journalism
This video looks at new field that technology brings to journalism, exploring the opportunities and challenges they bring for women in media and journalism, focussing especially in data journalism.
Watch Video
Sara de Vuyst
Hacking the Gender Gap
This video reflects on how technological advancement comes with gender challenges and opportunities, discussing several good practices and initiatives for gendered empowerment related to digitalization in journalism.
Watch Video
Week 3 – Harassment and Intersectionality
Julie Posetti
Defining the issues
This video introduces some of the key issues concerning violence against women journalists, showing how harassment is expressed and the language that is used. The video also brings some interviews with women who have had direct experience.
Watch Video
Julie Posetti
Emerging digital age threats
This video presents the ways in which digital and social media are being used to target women, journalists, spreading misinformation designed to humiliate and discredit them, also committing particular forms of cyber-violence including gender-related threats, harassment and intimidation on the internet, which has a direct impact on their safety and future online activities.
Watch Video
Alessandra Mondin
Beyond gender: intersectionality
In this video, Dr. Alessandra Mondin introduces the idea of intersectionality, the background and context to the term, including the primary notion that gender is only one aspect of our identity. She also reflects on how it allows for a better understanding of power dynamics
Watch Video
Alessandra Mondin
Case Study 1 – Race and Ethnicity
Using race as the first case study, Dr. Mondin demonstrates the intersectionality between gender and race, exploring how these two identity markers interact with each other shaping the experience of people, and also reflecting in which ways gender is raced and race is gendered, especially in the media.
Watch Video
Alessandra Mondin
Case Study 2 – LGBTQi Identities
As a second case study, this video looks at the ways in which sexualities and sexual identities are played out in the media as well as considering the ways in which stereotypes are being monitored and challenge by advocacy groups.
Watch Video
Alessandra Mondin
Case Study 3 – Disability and Identity
In this last case study, Dr. Mondin considers the ways in which disability works with gender to produce a range of stereotypes across popular media and having discrimination as a consequence.
Watch Video
Alessandra Mondin
Intersectionality and the Media: Concluding Thoughts
This video explains what intersectionality is and highlights the importance of it being used as a framework for analysis, exploring how privilege and oppression are both relational and contextual. It also highlights the importance of a diverse workforce, leading to a diverse media that can help resist, challenge and change imposed identities.
Watch Video
Week 2 – Women and Leadership
Karen Ross
Introduction
Woman and leadership in media industries
Karen Ross introduces to the world of media industry and it’s representation of women. On the basis of statistical numbers she shows significant inequalities like paygaps and the number of women in high ranking positions. Further on, Ross explores possible outcomes of gender-wise more equalized media industries.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Key issues
Woman and leadership in media industries
In this video Ross turns to the rather odd phenomenon of women’s careers in media being paid less and having less influence on the coverage – while the numbers of men and women starting those careers are balanced. Ross also shows how in parts of the media industry initiatives are forming and policies are put in place, to counter this development.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Research tends and patterns
Woman and leadership in media industries
The video digs deeper into the field of research of gender representation within the media industries themselves. Based on that Ross describes various aspects and systematics that build up to the fact of very few work environments in journalism, which actually treat women’s careers as equal as those of men.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Issues of structure
Woman and leadership in media industries
Ross turns away from academic and towards NGOs and professional associations, whose findings vary only little from the studies of the former. With the aid of those studies, Ross explains a number of both structural and cultural features which can function to restrict women’s professional ambitions.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Issues of culture
Woman and leadership in media industries
As in the previous video different structural reasons for women’s under-representation are analysed in great detail. A crucial aspect here is the narrative about family time women tend to take more likely than men, which gets discussed by Ross – and shown, that having children has surprisingly low influence on the issue.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Changing the picture
Woman and leadership in media industries
Karen Ross highlights that there are also particularly positive developments. She showcases different progressive approaches, informed by research and policy recommendations produced by academic researchers, women’s media associations, media unions and political institutions. The video then draws a conclusion on the issues discussed this week.
Watch Video
Week 1 – Gender and representation
Karen Ross
Overview: Issues in gender and representation
Karen Ross introduces the topic of gender representation in the news by first exploring the history of research on the field of “symbolic annihilation” of women. She shows how the marginalisation of women in media is a global phenomenon and how some outlets started to react by supporting diversity. Based on that Ross also explains the more recent approach of intersectionality.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Norms and stereotypes
Karen Ross guides through the international structure of research on gender inequality, starting from the World Conferences on Women. A central aspect is the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), which findings are surprisingly similar for the whole globe. Ross explains the central aspect of women being much more objectified content of news stories rather than producing them themselves.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Who is allowed to speak
In this video Karen Ross addresses the correlation between the under-representation of women and the predominant position of men in regard to being interviewed or asked for personal opinions. By examining this unequal distribution of privileges, she explains why news are rather “constructed” than “just happening”.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
It is not just about numbers
While further exploring the differing patterns of representation Karen Ross turns to the aspect of how news stories are told and what aspects they focus on. She shows how content correlates with stereotypes and how they are used to perpetuate sexist ideas about concepts of women, how they should look or behave.
Watch Video
Karen Ross
Why do we get what we get
In this last video Karen Ross draws a preliminary conclusion, after which some aspects like visibility of women in media have improved, while the basic problems still remain – as manifested for instance in the fact that female journalists tend to be reporting on lifestyle or fashion rather than politics, economy or sports, which are traditional subject to male news coverage.
Watch Video
Defining terms and challenging norms
In this video, we consider the normative use of language and the ways it values women and men differently before turning to discuss some of the ways in which those norms are being challenged.
Watch Video