Gender and Media

When we were asked to pick a topic for our final group exercise, it was clear that we wanted to write about something gender based. During the homework throughout the course, it became obvious to me and also my group partner, that gender based media and advertisement is still a topic to fight about, especially when it comes to movies and how they use certain gender roles. So in the following assignment, we would like to discuss how women are represented in media and how that is shown in films.

Throughout my research, concerning the topic gender and media I found articles published by the WMC the Women's Media Center, a non-profit organization which was founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, that is raising the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women in media. Jane Fonda once said: Gender inequality is so deeply ingrained in our culture, most people don't realize there is a problem."

This quotation can be stated by the WMC's reports "The Status of Women in the US. Media" which is published every year and mostly consists of statistics who show off the under representation of women in the media sector.

"By a nearly 3 to 1 margin, male front-page bylines at top newspapers outnumbered female bylines in coverage of the 2012 presidential election. Men were also far more likely to be quoted than women in newspapers, television and public radio."

Furthermore the IWMF (International Women Media Foundation) found out, that 73% of the top management jobs are occupied by men compared to 27% occupied by women. Among the ranks of reporters, men hold nearly two-thirds of the jobs, compared to 36% which are held by women.

That there is less women in media always shows in media itself. Looking through advertisement, it's common that what we find is sexism. We see women worrying about cooking or baking, shoe shopping deliveries or makeup and all of them present a certain image that clearly was not invented by females. The guardian published an interesting article concerning this topic in July 2015. It is stated there that google, who personalizes advertisement shows male people looking for jobs more adverts for high paving executive jobs, than it does for women. In the article it says The team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon built an automated testing rig called AdFisher that pretended to be a series of male and female job seekers. Their 17,370 fake profiles only visited job-seeker sites and were shown 600,000 adverts which the team tracked and analyzed offers that men got. And the statement a Google speakers woman made was: advertisers can choose to target the audience they want to reach, and we have policies that guide the type of interest-based ads that are allowed.

When even big rich companies like google don't seem to be interested in fixing this discrimination of a gender, then the gap between men and women can only get bigger.

Another example that we found throughout our research to show off that women are still less powerful in the media sector were movies.

Women in films today

Discrimination against women in the global film industry .

This is based on the first study about gender roles from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, UN Women and Rockefeller Community. About UN Women: UN Women is the worldwide leading organisation of the United Nations which exerts itself for the equalization of the genders and the strengthening of the women's rights. About Geena Davis institute on Gender in media: Founded by the Academy Award ® winner Geena Davis is Geena Davis institute of the equalization of the genders(sexes) in the media in the Mt. Saint Mary' college the only research organisation which works together with the media and the entertainment industry.

The first worldwide study about female characters in popular films, presented today, deeply shows seated discrimination and stereo classification of women and girls in the international film industry. The investigation analyses popular films straight through the most profitable countries and regions, including Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the USA, Great Britain, as well as the British-American co-productions.

During women half of the world population perform official duties are less than one third of all speaking characters in the films Women. Less than one quarter of all fictional employees on screens are women (22.5%). If they appear in the film as employees, women are far away from powerful positions. Women perform official duties in films less than 15% of the business people, the political figures or the employees in the scientific, technological or mathematical area.

The media pictures have a strong influence on the development and maintenance of our unaware perception. By contrast there rises the portion of the women if it comes to a Übersexualisierung. Girls and women are shown about twice as often than boy and men provocative, half-naked or in the nude. Female youthful characters (13-20 years) become as often as young(new), adult women (21-39 years) sexualisiert.

There are no women in action films and adventure films. Only 23% of the speech roles in these films are taken with women. From 1.452 filmmakers with an identifiable gender only 20.5% are female, 79.5% are male. Women put 7% of the directors, 19.7% of the scriptwriters and 22.7% of the producers. Films with female directors or scriptwriters clearly reach more girls and women than films without female directors or authors.

"These results show that we have worldwide more than only one film problem if it comes to the fact that girls and women are depreciated. We have a human problem." Davis says. The report shows how discriminating behaviour influences women and girls worldwide in films, however, puts outside also some significant differences between the countries. Furthermore strikes that only in one of four cases a woman stands behind the camera . If, nevertheless, a woman behind the camera stands the number of the female characters rises significantly. Remedy against gender inequalities in films offers the setting of more female filmmakers. Another action is the sensitisation of film persons responsible to gender inequalities and stereoclassification on the screen. "Now the evidence has been adduced by the study that that what we see on the screen illustrates the actual living conditions of women", so Davis.

This outlook on how women are still discriminated in most areas of the film industry shows that there is still a lot to work on. Personally we still see a tiny bit of development. A lot of films deal with topics now that are different from what they used to be like. Movies like "the Hungergames" or even the Disney movie "Frozen" present a different picture than what they used to, because there's no helpless woman who needs to be saved by a shining knight in armor. Still, a lot needs to be done before women and men are represented equally in the media sector.

Sources:

• http://www.iwmf.org/our-research/global-report/
• http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/08/women-less-likely-ads-high-paid-jobs-google-study
• http://www.unwomen.de/aktuelles/aktuelle-nachrichten/weltweit-1-studie-zu-diskriminierung-von-frauen-in-der-globalen-filmindustrie/