A Beijing+30 reflection

Exactly 30 years ago today, hope for a new dawn for women and girls was palpable.

Governments and civil society that had gathered in Beijing for the Fourth UN World Conference on Women were united on a roadmap to end gender-based discrimination and achieve equality between women and men.

An entire cultural era later, the Beijing dream remains just that – a dream.

Newly hired to support Africa’s preparations for Beijing in the context of the region’s NGO Forum, I lost myself in the technical event-management details. The substantive issues of gender inequality remained an academic exercise, a feminist consciousness not yet awakened.

Connecting the dots to the lived experience a lifetime later, it is clear that the status of women has hardly shifted. Strides made in education, in politics, in the economy, have not translated to change in how women are perceived and treated in society. Those who are also part of historically marginalized groups remain as excluded as they always were.

Media are a mirror, albeit an exaggerated one, of society. Society’s perceptions of women’s worth or lack of it, are reflected in the media.

At the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), we have followed the numbers since 1995, documenting differences in media representation of women in comparison to men. We have tracked how the differences have changed or not, across the 30 years. We have advocated, trained, lobbied, collaborated, networked, consulted, supported, and urged every possible actor in the news media ecosystem to play their part.

Progress is not linear; it has ups, downs, and seasons of stagnation. Recently released findings of our 2025 research indicate that the statistic on women’s presence in mainstream news as sources and subjects has inched up a mere nine points in 30 years to reach 26%.

The road to news gender equality just lengthened to eight decades, one more than predicted in 2020. Progress towards news gender equality began flatlining 15 years ago, after an equally long period of snailspace but sure, incremental change.

The world depicted in the news is one in which women are just a quarter of humanity. Their expertise in the professions is treated as secondary. That gender-based violence (GBV) is a feature of their everyday experience as intimate partners, workers, and ordinary people going about their business in public spaces is clearly not a concern for the media. Less than 2 percent of the news covers GBV.

The study has established patterns and trends. Women reporters are more likely to feature women as subjects than their male counterparts. Diversifying newsroom staff is not simply a hiring issue, rather, it is essential for bringing different voices into the conversation.

Influences on media representation of women and gender relations are no doubt numerous, not least, the broader environment.  The start of the plateau in progress coincides with  global, regional, and national events representing the erosion of women’s rights and push back on gender equality.  

Authoritarian governments rose up in numerous nations, as did right-wing religious fundamentalism. Some rejected multilateralism and peddaled back on human rights frameworks. The global health COVID-19 crisis happened, accompanied by the second pandemic of intensified GBV.  Today, the backlash thrives online, further enabled through artificial intelligence, silencing women and deterring them from participating in public life.

Personal victories for some individual women aside, the subordinate status of the collective “we” remains, much more so for those living multiple axes of marginalization. 

Thirty years post-Beijing, “gender discrimination remains deeply embedded in the structures of economies and societies” according to UN Women’s review report.  News media as a whole – rather than individual outlets – have largely been complicit in egging on this discrimination.

The experience these past three decades and the research evidence make it clear that the way forward has, of necessity, to be radically different.

Image: Shutterstock AI

The crisis is not unique to South Africa. In her recent report, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Dubravka Šimonović, termed such violence a “global plague” that “affects one in three women worldwide in their lifetime and, as such, creates a culture of normalization and tolerance of such violence in society”.

This year the plague has gained a new moniker as the “epidemic within the pandemic” given the dramatic rise in reported cases due to the lockdowns.

Women working in the media industry are facing a new enemy that is compounding the systematic and structural gender-based violence characteristic of their daily routine, according to Šimonović’s observations.

Over 50% of women journalists in 52 countries responding to a survey by the International Federation of Journalists reported having experienced some form of bullying or harassment at work before the pandemic. Currently, the situation is the same or has become worse for a third of them.

Women journalists “are often targeted for being highly visible and outspoken and for their work, especially when they are breaking the rules of gender inequity and stereotypes.” This point is made in the Special Rapporteur’s report. It gives an insight into the reasons why award-winning journalist Maria Ressa is being subjected to a campaign of harassment by her government, in spite of countless petitions by the global community to drop the charges.

Let’s consider the media’s approach to giving this plague the limelight – or not.

Media reports are replete with statistics and stories on Covid19 infection and mortality, affecting more men than women. The pilot research of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) in May 2020 in Austria found not a single story on VAW on the Internet home pages of national news organisations nor in their tweets. Monitoring in China in April found not a single story on VAW in Chinese print, broadcast or online news.

So, while the pandemic’s impact on men is highly visible in media content, the plague within the pandemic affecting women even more is normalized as non-news in the industry’s output.

Incidentally, the Polish justice minister has found this to be a good time to propose the country’s withdrawal from the European treaty on violence against women.

Photo:Fizkes/Shutterstock

In future, and in an effort to save £80 million, journalists will be covering fewer stories as the corporation faces an uncertain future. BBC journalists will increasingly be organised in centralised teams rather than working individually for specific programmes, with an increased emphasis on online output rather than television and radio stations.

The plan includes reducing the number of stories produced by the BBC and then sharing them via multiple outlets. In practice, this means that the same reporter – who may or may not have a specialised news “beat” or expertise – might produce a report for radio, television and online consumption rather than for a single show.

Newsnight, Radio 5 live, and the World Service’s English-language output will be among the worst affected stations and programmes.

In April 2018, the BBC launched its 50:50 challenge, aiming for an equal number of male and female expert contributors on-air and online. A year later, a survey showed that nearly three-quarters of BBC news and current affairs/topical programmes had an equal number of male and female expert contributors.

However, it is not easy to establish how many women reporters are producing stories behind the scenes, and a knock on effect of the decision to cut 450 jobs might mean fewer women journalists in a profession already under fire for unequal pay structures.

In an LSE blog dated 17 September 2019 titled “The long, hard road to gender equality in journalism” – which uses statistics from WACC’s Global Media Monitoring Project – George Pitcher writes:

“The final comment here goes to another man, Richard Fletcher, Business Editor at The Times. On the broader issue of diversity, he sees national journalism in the UK being dominated ‘by a middle-class demographic, very Oxbridge, very white’ of which gender is a component. Of his own demographic qualification for a career in journalism he says: ‘I am white, middle-class and male – it just depresses me that this is the default profile for journalism. And I also think it affects our coverage’.”

Pitcher notes, “That last observation contains precisely why journalism needs to get its internal gender politics right. Not just because it’s the right thing to do for talented and industrious women in journalism. But because it makes journalism as good as it can be.”

Photo above: BAZA Production/Shutterstock