The Global Media Monitoring Project

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is the largest international study of gender in the news media. It is also an advocacy organization that aims to change the representation of women in the news media. Every five years since 1995 the GMMP collects data on indicators of gender in the news, such as: the presence of women, gender bias, and stereotyping. The most recent study, conducted in 2015, encompassed 114 countries.

The idea for a media monitoring project was created at the Women Empowering Communication international conference in Bangkok in 1994. The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) along with MediaWatch (Canada) took up the project. They had several key goals:

Coverage

The 1995 Report covered 71 countries, and was conducted by volunteers over the span of one day. Consequent studies took place in 2000 and covered 70 countries, in 2005 covering 76 countries, in 2010 in 108 countries and in 2015 in 114 countries. All of the monitoring and compiling of reports is carried out by volunteers. GMMP reports have been presented at the Women’s NGO Forum in Beijing (1995), the UN Beijing + 5 (2000), a parallel-session at the Commission on the Status of Women 2010 session, and in 100 Women BBC series 2015 "Is News Failing Women?".

The 2015 Project covered 22,136 news items, 26,010 news personnel, and 45,402 total news subjects in newspaper, radio, television, internet news and news media tweets. The research discussed news subjects, personnel and content through the framework of media accountability to women .

News Subjects

The report discovered that progress towards gender parity in the news has almost ground to a halt over the period 2010 to 2015: Women make up only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news, exactly as they did in 2010. Over the past two decades, the gender gap in people in the news has narrowed most dramatically in Latin America by 13 percent. Women are three percent less visible in political news stories now than five years ago. They comprise 38% of people interviewed on the basis of personal experience compared to 31% in 2005. North America has the highest percentage of women experts in the news (32%), followed by the Caribbean (29%) and Latin America (29%). In 2015, progress towards news representation that acknowledges women's participation in economic life remain elusive: While women in the real world hold at least 40% of paid employment globally, in the news world only 20% of the workers in the formal labor force are women, while 67% of the news world unemployed and stay-at-home parents are women. Portrayals of women as survivors of domestic violence have risen by more than four times across the period 2005 to 2015.

Reporters and Presenters

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