Reykjavík Grapevine - 14.08.2015, Qupperneq 12

Media | Hello?
Watching the watchmen
Preliminary results from said report,
due this autumn, show that little to no
progress has been made in Iceland or
worldwide. The Global Media Monitor-
ing Project—the international watchdog
organisation behind it—released a press
release detailing “an increase of just 1%
from five years ago when only 24% of the
people heard or read about in print, radio
and television news were female.”
GMMP was established two decades
ago, and conducts a one-day survey ev-
ery five years. It examines women’s role
in news in numerous countries, using a
strict set of tools to interpret their repre-
sentation as reporters, hosts, interview-
ees, subjects and more. Their 2010 report
included Iceland as one of the surveyed
countries, and the results revealed the
dearth of improvement in the years since
the Ministry of Education’s report.
We met up with Valgerður Anna
Jóhannsdóttir, the person responsible
for Iceland’s contribution to the GMMP.
Her small office smelled like old papers,
its shelves were stuffed with books and
journals, and her desk was similarly clut-
tered with newspapers, magazines, and
student essays.
Valgerður has twenty years of expe-
rience as a reporter for print, radio and
television. She quickly rose through the
ranks to become a supervisor, but said she
struggled to balance shift work with fam-
ily life, and contemplated dropping out,
but somehow couldn’t imagine herself
not working in media. In 2008, she found
a happy medium, becoming an adjunct
lecturer at the University of Iceland,
where she leads the master’s programme
in journalism.
She showed me her initial results
for Iceland, which show that the total
number of women writing, being inter-
viewed or otherwise the subject of news
is down to 24% from 27% in 2010. Ad-
ditionally, 28% of news was reported by
women compared to 33% in 2010, and
women were the subject of news in only
20% of the cases, compared to 28% five
years earlier. Valgerður said that the final
numbers might come out a little differ-
ently, but the fact of the matter couldn’t
be clearer: women’s presence in media is
diminishing.
No clear answers in sight
Valgerður noted that there were many
theories behind why the number was so
low this year both for Iceland and other
countries. The survey was conducted
on the same day in March that the Ger-
manwings pilot Andreas Lubitz crashed
a plane into the Alps, so news outlets all
over the world were busy interviewing
airline CEOs, air-traffic controllers, and
pilots, most of whom are male. And lo-
cally, labour and wage disputes made a
lot of headlines in March, which meant
union leaders, most of whom are male,
were heavily represented.
Having said
that, Valgerður
didn’t believe
those were valid
excuses for this
stagnation over
the past five
years. “It’s ob-
viously not the
case that wom-
en aren’t doing
n e w s w o r t h y
things,” she said.
“Instead, there’s something about how
reporters work that makes them reach
out to men rather than women.”
Valgerður pointed out how stud-
ies have shown that the general public
more readily trusts men and their nar-
rative, while women face much more
scrutiny when they step into the spot-
light. That’s not to say that men are
more reliable, however, as Valgerður
said they’re often simply less hesitant to
speak when they possess an incomplete
picture, while women prefer to prepare
themselves and have the right answers.
In an environment where an increas-
ing amount of news happens online—
where speed is of the essence—it’s easy
to see why many would justify just going
straight to a confident man for answers.
“One could debate whether it’s really to
the article’s benefit to reach someone
willing to speak before they think,” Val-
gerður said. “If women take longer com-
ing up with a more accurate answer, then
that might actually benefit the article.”
Navel-gazing
Statistics Iceland stated at the end of 2014
that 45% of the media profession was
made up of women, and yet these women
don’t seem to be getting their bylines at-
tached to articles in equal measure, being
stuck behind the same glass ceil-
ing as fourteen years ago.
Valgerður doesn’t have a sim-
ple solution, other than hiring
more women into newsrooms,
and interviewing more women.
She didn’t lay the onus on re-
porters to make that change
happen; instead she believes
management and owners of
media companies need to take
responsibility. At present, both
state-owned RÚV and private
media corporation 365 have stated in
their official policies that they wish to be
more egalitarian, and Valgerður believes
that’s where improvements need to be
made.
“Journalists face tremendous pres-
sure and stress in their day-to-day jobs
in delivering God knows how many news
stories a day, and they routinely get very
little support,” Valgerður said. “When
there is demand for greater productivity
but fewer people to meet it, the quality
invariably suffers. Upper management
needs to follow through with their lofty
promises.”
Valgerður said that although she feels
like women aren’t coming any closer to
breaking through the glass ceiling, she
would still like to believe that change
is possible. “The attitudes fuelling the
present status quo are deeply rooted, and
tackling them will involve facing a lot of
our own preconceived notions.”
Back in the first quarter of 2001, Iceland’s Ministry
of Education released an extensive report on women
in media. Through wide-ranging surveys that exam-
ined a whole week of TV broadcasts and printed media,
the report detailed how women were seen and heard
much less than men, only appearing in 30% of prime-
time broadcasts, and only speaking in 15% of them.
Fourteen years later, little has changed, according to
an upcoming international report.
Words by Gabríel Benjamin
Photo by Hörður Sveinsson
12 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2015
Binders,
Not Papers,
Full Of Women
Well Documented
Inequality
Women’s role, visibility, and inequal-
ity in media in Iceland has been ex-
amined in numerous academic pa-
pers. Here is a short list of some of the
highlights from the past few years.
• Nanna Árnadóttir’s 2011 thesis
“Strength in Numbers?” showed
how the newsroom hierarchy greatly
favoured men over women, that all
news outlets employed more men
than women, and that state-run RÚV
had a more egalitarian structure than
privately owned Morgunblaðið.
• Sunna Stefánsdóttir’s 2013 thesis
“Bág staða íslenskra blaðakvenna”
(“Poor Situation of Female Icelan-
dic Journalists”) found women to be
writing significantly fewer articles
than men were, and that they had less
opportunity to write stories about
certain topics, such as sports, busi-
ness and politics.
• Arnhildur Hálfdánardóttir’s 2014
thesis “Aðgengi eða áhugi?” (“Acces-
sibility or Interest?”) showed how
women’s work was given less weight
than that made by their male coun-
terparts. It also revealed men’s perva-
sive blindness to their own privilege
through qualitative research.
• Kristín Ósk Elíasdóttir and
Ragnheiður Hera Gísladóttir’s 2015
thesis “Eru karlar sýnilegri en konur í
fjölmiðlum?” (“Are Men More Visible
than Women in Media?”) revealed
that women made up 30% or less of
those reporting or being reported on
in print media over a period of seven
weekdays.
Follow developments on the 2015 GMMP
on www.whomakesthenews.com
“The attitudes fuel-
ling the present sta-
tus quo are deeply
rooted, and tackling
them will involve
facing a lot of our
own preconceived
notions.”
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