Screening
Gender: From Theory to Praxis
An account of a project on gender portrayal for European
media professionals
4th
European Feminist Research Conference
Bologna, 2000
Workshop 2: Gender in
the Society of Spectacles
Minna
Aslama
Implementation
Expert, Screening Gender Project
Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE)
University of Helsinki, Department of Communication
PO Box 54
00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
1
Introduction: How Feminist Media
Studies Entered the World of European Broadcasting
The media have always been critiqued by the feminist
movement; in addition to equal rights and opportunities issues, symbolic
representations of women and femininity have been debated about (see account in
van Zoonen 1994). However, among the wider public, as well as within
broadcasting organisations, the discussion about gender images on television is
a fairly recent one. Gender portrayal has briefly been considered in the
context of violence and explicit sex on screen, and of stereotypes in TV-commercials.
But as a topic in its own right it has not much interested either media
policy makers, journalists or television audience themselves. Because of this association with the
sex-and-violence genre and with
stereotypical advertising, discussion of the images of women has been
linked to commercial television in particular, and has not been perceived as a major concern for European public
television.
Today, due to
the recent changes in European media, issues of gender representation in
relation to audience perceptions are attracting more attention. These changes
are resulting in new media policies and new questions for research. Deregulation and the advent of new transmission
technologies have increased the number of channels which viewers can choose
from. Audience targeting, long since
standard practice in the United States, has become a crucial part of survival
also within the European context.
Can feminist
media studies’ perspectives, then, be a part of programme policies as well as
everyday, practical programme making routines? Is gender portrayal in
programming important for journalists and audiences? Can fair and diverse
representation of women and men bring added-value and competitive advantage to
broadcasting corporations? The answer to these questions is yes, at least for
six northern European public broadcasting companies: YLE (Finland), SVT
(Sweden), NRK (Norway), NOS (The Netherlands), ZDF (Germany) and DR (Denmark)[1].
Together, these companies produced the training kit Screening Gender, to help promote good practice in gender portrayal
on television. Their approach suggests not
only that diversity in gender
portrayal is one of the characteristics of quality programming, but
that it makes good business sense for public service broadcasters.
The training
kit is a concrete effort to use
equality policies and theories about
media and gender to the advantage of both audiences and broadcasters. Its focus
is the relationship between changing European media markets, national and
international equality policies, and the current picture of television
programming from a gender-oriented perspective – all within the context of public broadcasting in
Europe.
2
Equality Policies and Public
Broadcasting in Europe
In most European
countries, the debate about gender portrayal is not rooted in business-oriented
thinking. Rather, most emphasis has been placed on the traditions and national
policies of equal opportunities in the workplace. An early forum for such
discussion was the Steering Committee on
Equal Opportunities in Broadcasting (1986-96). Established by the European
Commission, this brought together
representatives of public and private broadcasting companies from the European
Union, to exchange experiences and promote good practice in employment and
career development opportunities. Although the Steering Committee regularly discussed
the need for a similar arena for information exchange on content related
matters, this was never formed. There was simply too little practical
experience to frame such a forum.
However, in early 1990s
individual companies began to take seriously
the need for change in the
portrayal of men and women in programme content. For example, in 1991 NOS (Netherlands) formed a Gender Portrayal Department to conduct
research and training – work which is
still on-going. In YLE (Finland), a five-year initiative called the Portrayal of Women and Men Project was
launched in 1994. It produced and commissioned studies, from news to
entertainment programming and audience research, and also organised in-house
seminars and learning-by-doing training events. Numerous other European
companies addressed the issue by organising special events and/or research.
Then in 1995, two
international policy documents came into being which required commitment from
European public broadcasters: The United Nations Fourth World Conference
on Women, Platform for Action (Section J: The Media), and the European Union / European Broadcasting Union
Charter on Equal Opportunities for Women in Broadcasting, the latter signed
by representatives of approximately 40 European broadcasting companies.[2]
Although these documents are more general guidelines than commitments to
specific actions, they represent an understanding that gender portrayal is a
crucial element in how the media represent reality, and indeed they acknowledge the need to improve and
diversify media contents. Because the
issue was made internationally relevant and brought into public discussion,
various individual broadcasting companies have woken up to this reality through
analysis of their own programming and audiences. Prompted by these
developments, YLE, SVT, NRK, DR, NOS and ZDF began a collaboration which in 1997
resulted in Screening Gender – a three-year project to produce a training kit for television. The project was
co-financed under the European Commission's Fourth Community Action Programme
on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men.
3
Society is Changing – The Media are
Not?
Research Results on
Gender Portrayal in Northern European Television
The developments just described are an indication to European
broadcasting companies that our societies are changing, in terms not only of social demographics but
also of public concern about the ways gender is portrayed in the media. Moreover, research shows that the perception
of northern European countries as ”equality flagships” is not reflected in
media content. In Finland, for example,
women have traditionally had a strong presence in the public sphere. For some
years, they have formed the majority in universities (54% in 1997), they
comprise 47.6 % of the labour force (1996), and are well represented in the
political arena. In 1995, women represented 33.5% of MPs in
the Finnish Parliament; in 1996, they comprised 50% of the Finnish Euro-MPs[3]. Yet YLE research from 1995 showed that women
accounted for only 21% of the ”actors” in Finnish television news, the most
official and public form of television (Halonen 1995). This result matches the
average for 71 countries world-wide, according to the 1995 Global Media Monitoring Project’s
study Women’s Participation in the
News (MediaWatch 1995; the results of a new round of the study, conducted
in February 2000, forthcoming in Autumn 2000).
When the Screening Gender participating
organisations began co-operation on gender issues in the mid 1990s, they agreed
on the need to obtain an overview of how women and men are portrayed in their
programming. The rationale was to find out if and how these companies, with similar public broadcasting
philosophies and cultural backgrounds, differ
in terms of gender portrayal. The
result was Who Speaks on Television[4], research based on a constructed week of television output in late 1997. A
total of 371 hours of the partner companies’ prime-time programming was
analysed. The main finding is that only
32% of all participants in northern European television are women. The various companies differ only slightly,
as illustrated in the graph below:
Another striking finding is that
although women’s participation in
decision-making and public life in these countries is very high –
representation of women in the national parliaments, for example, ranges from
31% in Germany to 43% in Sweden[5]
- women were most often portrayed in roles equated with low social status: 47%
of ”ordinary citizens” and 37% of
victims were women, whereas men comprised the great majority of politicians
(72%) and experts (80%). Other European studies show a similar trend, yet some
claim that women are in fact over-represented as victims in all factual
programming (Kivikuru et al. 1999; Michielsensens & ten Boom 1995).
According to the Who Speaks study, the largest female
participation is found in programmes with traditional ”women’s topics”, such as
human relations, family affairs, social and health issues. Women are least
represented in programmes dealing with crime, technology/science and sports.
Overall, sports programming shows the smallest proportion of women (9%), while children’s and youth
programming proves to be the most balanced (44% women). There is also a definite age factor: the
younger the woman, the more likely she is to appear on the screen. The slight
majority (51%) of those 19 years old or younger are women, but the figure
declines dramatically with age: out of the 20-34 year-olds, 43% are women; of
the 35-49 year-olds, 32% are women; and of the over 50 year-olds, only 20% are
women.
Although there has traditionally been a relatively
significant presence of women journalists in Northern Europe, and there has
been an further influx of women as content-producing professionals into media
organisations in the 1990s, they still seem to remain as a clear minority at
the media’s decision-making level (e.g. Kivikuru et al. 1999) Also, many
Western studies gender of the person writing stories and making programmes does
not automatically translate into changes in media contents (Carter et al. 1998,
Kivikuru et al. 1999, Leonard 1998). This is established also by the
international results of the Global Media Monitoring Project, and
it was particularly blatant with women and political news: even though women
comprised 44% of the journalists reporting on politics and government, they
were hardly present as interviewees of those stories (MediaWatch 1995). It
seems, then, further confirmed in the Northern European context by Finnish and
Dutch research, that content and form still define whether women and men work
in journalism; gender of the journalist does not determine the topic and the
approach on what is news (Zilliacus-Tikkanen 1997, van Zoonen 1994 & 1998).
4
Gender-focused Media Studies and
Broadcasting: Defining a Market or Making A Difference?
Do these research
results matter? Of course in a traditionally feminist sense they
would, since they show that the media do not reflect social reality. This,
however, is not often a sufficient argument for a broadcasting company, let
alone an individual programme-maker with a deadline to meet. And regarding the
gender of the programme-maker, as depicted above, it seems that gender of the
journalist does not guarantee responsibility or even interest to automatically
consider the validity and diversity of gender representations. Journalists
often respond to concerns about gender portrayal with arguments based on their
own programme-making logic: the media
cannot represent every aspect of social reality and certain topics require the
presence of men (”there are no women prime ministers in Finland”). Another
common claim is that time frame and resources are limited (”I would have loved
to interview an expert woman, but they are harder to find than men”).
There is, however, a strong argument
for trying to help programme-makers overcome these obstacles - namely the
business-minded search for satisfied customers. In today's commercial media
environment broadcasting decision-makers and programme-makers must be
increasingly responsive to their audiences. Existing standard quantitative
television audience measures describe what women watch in general, but do not
explain or investigate what - given a choice - women would prefer to see and
hear in the media. Existing research does not give many hints about alternative
ways of making programmes which will result
in television that appeals to a
variety of female audiences.
For public broadcasting companies, increased competition
has posed many difficulties. Formerly,
the operation of a public broadcasting company destined to serve the public was
guaranteed merely by saying so. Today public radio and television are under the
same pressure as commercial companies to
prove that large numbers tune in or watch their programmes. Now that numbers
matter, women as members of the audience have also begun to matter.
A recent state-of-the-art review of research on images of
women in European media initiated by the European Commission (Kivikuru et al. 1999) claims that, although inadequate
in many ways, standard quantitative audience measurement provides the only
systematic data gathered on audiences - male or female. However, this research
has not satisfactorily dealt with the question of audience choice, or the role of gender portrayal in making these choices.
Thus it has been relatively unhelpful
in formulating media policies intended to serve women audiences.
Although there has been little comprehensive research on
gendered audiences, studies throughout Europe can be said to show a fairly
predictable pattern of gender differences in the media preferences of women and men. Although there is not
much difference in time spent watching television, women tend to prefer drama (including serials and soap operas),
talk shows and certain comedy programmes,
while men prefer sports, action-oriented series and information programmes,
including news and current affairs.
These patterns have been confirmed for several countries such as Sweden
(Abrahamsson 1990) and the United
Kingdom (Livingstone 1994).
Like other public
broadcasters concerned by the fragmentation of media markets and audiences, YLE
has conducted studies of the characteristics and preferences of various female
and male audiences (Jääsaari & Sarkkinen 1995 & 1998). The
research confirms the traditionally gendered division of programme genres, but
also indicates that diverse and varied gender portrayal means more engaging
programming for viewers and listeners.
For instance, a focus group study of TV news viewers (Aslama 1995) shows
that audiences are tired of the standardised middle-class-and-aged-men-in-suits
on the news, and would appreciate a broader approach that helps them
connect the news to their everyday lives. Another YLE-commissioned study of prime-time programming and its
audiences (Nikunen et al. 1996) makes it clear that more varied and
non-stereotypical gender representation is mostly found in fiction and
entertainment and that, although this is one of the key
attractions for different audience groups, until now it is commercial
television which has noticed the phenomenon and has addressed it more effectively than public broadcasting. Moreover
the fact that audiences actively
search for ‘identification
opportunities’, and that such opportunities are more limited for
women than for men, is convincingly demonstrated by a 1995 NOS study of television drama (NOS Gender Portrayal Department
1995). These issues are explored further in a YLE focus group study of the need for “women’s programmes” on
television. For example, that study
indicates that although audiences are
accustomed to programme segmenting by gender, they have slowly begun to resent the traditional dichotomy between factual
programmes as a male domain and entertainment/fiction targeted at women (Aslama
1999, Aslama & Jääsaari 1999).
The lesson learned is
that not only have the structures of societies changed more rapidly than their images in the media, but
that the taste of various audiences regarding gender portrayal seems less
traditional than actual programme output. Since public broadcasting faces
exponentially increasing competition and the internationalisation of their
markets, and because audiences have simultaneously split into smaller segments
that can select between ever more channels and programming, the entire
legitimisation of publicly funded media is now questioned in public debate.
Success depends on diversification in comparison with commercial broadcasting;
and here the public service traditions of diversity and equality may be seen as
tools to appeal to both broad and small target audience segments, putting fair
gender portrayal to the fore.
5
Screening Gender – From Theory to
Practice
The training kit Screening Gender aims to bridge the gaps
between all the issues discussed here. It is rooted in the strong equality and
diversity policies and legislation of northern European public broadcasting; it
acknowledges the skewed representation of women and men in current media
output; and it recognises the value of diverse gender representation as a
quality criterion for public broadcasting. But this alone does not
automatically translate into higher quality programming with an emphasis on
fair gender portrayal. Thus, the aim of
the training kit is to go to the heart of programme production and to provide
programme makers with examples which will provoke discussion, and which may
suggest alternative ways of doing their work.
In practical terms, the kit is a
‘package’ of audiovisual material as well as related texts, consisting of:
·
Video
“Who’s in the Picture?”, including programme examples from the six
participating broadcasters, to illustrate how images of gender are constructed.
·
Video
“The Wider Picture”, showing sequences – some specially produced for the kit –
from drama to talk shows to news, to demonstrate how using a gender perspective
can improve programme quality.
·
Video
“This is My Picture” including personal accounts from programme-makers on their
take on gender portrayal.
·
Written
material:
·
Introduction
and background information on what is meant by gender and gender portrayal, and
how it has been approached by media studies (as well as practical suggestions
for various user groups);
·
Discussion
points for trainers, fact sheets for trainees;
·
The
Who Speaks study (including a coding grid and instructions for users of the kit
who are interested in conducting similar quantitative content analysis);
·
Additional
reading and further references.
The videos “Who’s in the Picture?”
and “The Wider Picture” utilise a range of methods and research results of the
tradition of feminist media studies, to illustrate in practice how gender
images can be analysed, deconstructed and thus potentially changed. For
instance, quantitative results of Who Speaks and other similar research of
women’s absence are illustrated in clips of poignant current affairs
programmes, as well as by a news item and its remake (2nd version to
include women). In addition, more qualitative methods are consulted to show how
there still exists a range of gendered binary oppositions regarding concepts
and concrete issues of the public and private spheres of the society – ranging
from the way women and men interviewees are addressed on TV to what roles they
are given (e.g. expert or victim) and in which locations they are filmed.
Issues such as the use of camera angles, or, on the other hand, how gender
stereotypes are turned around to create humour in sitcoms, are taken up, based
on various research available.[6]
One of the
greatest challenges has been to create training tools that relate to
programme-makers’ everyday, concrete
practices, instead of taking a lecture-like, distanced and policy-oriented
approach. Testing of the kit -- with
journalists, producers, directors, as well as media managers in the
participating countries -- has shown that the quality criterion of
equality/diversity in public broadcasting is not a matter of theory, but
something that programme-makers and other media professionals accept as crucial
in today’s northern European societies. Media professionals themselves have
remarked that by paying closer attention to gender, one can often reframe other
production routines as well, which in turn results in more innovative and
competitive programming. However, the
decades of both quantitative an qualitative research on media and gender, and
theorising on issues such as stereotypes and representation, spectatorship and
the gaze, the politics of the popular, just to mention a few, have provided the
foundation in which such a move from theory to praxis of programme-making can
finally – and convincingly – be made.
6 Screening
Diversity – The Future
This
international co-operation has shown that what is at issue concerns not just
single programmes or journalists, but reflects a phenomenon that is similar and
shared across northern Europe. Moreover, co-operation across national borders
has increased the public visibility of the partner companies nationally and
internationally, and has helped them to build their company images as
gender-concerned, gender-sensitive and innovation-oriented.
In the European
unifying market where public broadcasting still comprises 40% of all viewing,
but where digitalisation and commercialisation will increase dramatically
within the next few years (Silvo 1998), this kind of work is essential in
pin-pointing the strengths and potential of
public broadcasting. Digitalisation will mean hundreds, if not thousands, of new European-wide public and
private channels. At the same time,
this means that audiences are less unified and more scattered in their viewing
practices. While some new channels may be targeted at women (e.g. UK Living, Teva in France, or TM3 in Germany), their philosophy is
likely to be based on pure market principles, aimed at attracting those women
with the greatest purchasing power. Such an approach does not consider equality
as a general quality criterion in programming, but may result in televised ghettos
for ”women’s issues” and is likely to define those issues in a very traditional
and stereotyped way. This, in turn,
could leave unexplored the interests and realities of many small audience
groups.
The Screening Gender project has
highlighted another concern in this changing media situation: there seems to be
a need from the programme-makers’ side to find tools to deal with their new,
fragmented and multicultural social environment. Thus, discussions about gender
stimulate discussions about other aspects of programme-making that will become
increasingly challenging throughout European broadcasting. Screening Gender, then, is the first step and attempt, under one
specific theme, to take theories, findings and analytical tools of feminist
media studies into praxis of programme-making.
The promise is there for research on ethnicity and other forms of
diversity to gain ground not only in academic agendas, but those of the
newsrooms and editing units as well.
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Aslama, Minna 1995. Katsojien arvioita
television ihmiskuvasta. [Viewers’ assessments of the image of people in
television news]. In Sana, Elina (ed.). Naiset, miehet ja uutiset [Women, men and the news].
Publications of the Equality Committee, Series A:1/1995. Finnish Broadcasting
Company, Helsinki.
Aslama, Minna (1999) Private Talk in
Public. A Case Study on a Talk Show in Finnish Television. In Sreberny, Annabelle & van Zoonen, Liesbet. Gender,
Politics and Communication. Hampton Press, New Jersey.
Aslama, Minna & Jääsaari, Johanna 1999. Women Audiences
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19/99. Finnish Broadcasting Company, Helsinki.
Carter, Cynthia, Branston, Gill
& Allan, Stuart eds., 1998 News, gender and power. London , New York: Routledge.
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