Equality between females and males cannot be attained using legal channels only. How people, cultures, and societies perceive gender and equality can make an immense difference. The aspect means that individuals must start believing and behaving as if women and men are equal. The attitudes towards equality and females are shaped in various ways. They can arise from personal experiences, social values, or people’s upbringings. Two essential contributors of stereotypes and attitudes are culture and popular media. This paper examines popular media particularly print media to identify how women are represented as well as their presence or absence in the form of popular media.
The proliferation of mass media in various countries has allowed the employment of women to increase and their issues to gain more attention. Women are now in print media as both sources and subjects of stories cementing their statuses and experiences as practitioners in the media industry. There are increased opportunities for the females in journalism schools as well as in editorial posts. The women have also battled with the ideology of being holed to handle the soft matters as they venture into hard news such as investigative reporting, war, and photojournalism. However, their roles continue to remain passive because news is considered as a serious aspect that cannot be tied to a feminine image (American Society of Newspaper Editors, par. 3).
The women’s voices in the print media remain marginal as the negative portrayal of the gender continues. Despite the looming challenges of females as double employees, males continue to harass them and air their stereotypes (Global Media Monitoring Project, par. 4). To explore the topic further, this paper will look at several top print industries in media. The mainstream newspapers under investigation are the Toronto Sun, The Star, CBC Toronto, Metro Toronto, and the Globe and Mail. All these newspapers have very few women editors and address women issues minimally. Evidently, journalism in the Toronto newspapers is more of a man’s globe than a woman’s. None of the sites provide specific sections concerning feminine interests.
The newspapers also provide minimal images of women, and very few females write letters to the editors unless in the sections pertaining marriage and love matters. Generally, the ratio of women’s to men’s representation in the print media is approximately 30 to 70 percentage. Luckily, the percentage of females is set to increase over the next decades as more women venture into journalism and slowly take over editorial positions. In most of the stories written by editors about females, women are depicted as victims. They are also susceptible to being identified in terms of their familial roles, physical appearance, and age compared to the males. Take the example of a story published by Metro Toronto whereby a Black woman is denied her inheritances because she is Black and at the same time female (Metro Toronto “Top Stories”).
The women hardly emerge in important stories in print media such as matters involving politics and national development. Additionally, the leadership in the mass communication industry is still controlled by the men. With a margin of 3 is to 1, men’s by-lines registered at the top of the five newspapers outnumber the by-lines of women. Given the prevalent belief that women’s ideas are inappropriate for the serious content within which news is suited, it is no wonder the females are underrepresented in the media industry. The women themselves also do not have much interest in joining print media (Levine, 14). So why exactly does the lack of authority arise in the female gender?
The underlying reason for the lack of authority associated with women in print media and other popular media channels is due to the relationship between sexuality and the female bodies. Female sexuality and femininity in women’s physical appearances are viewed as opposing to the serious nature of news. According to Patricia Holand (9) in “When a Woman Reads the News” the women’s bodies place them in a position that prevents the society from having a serious reaction to the information. The photographs of females in the print media will act as a distraction particularly to the male reader who will not focus on the importance of the message but if the female editor or newspaper image is attractive.
Ironically, the sexual attractiveness ideology of women in print media is not challenged. Instead, the females are held accountable for distracting readers and affecting how males sexualize their bodies. The sexuality portrayed in the five newspapers above is not only distracting but also tends to demean the rest of the female population. For instance, in the entertainment section of the Toronto Sun, images of female celebrities in attractive figure hugging attire are provided. Most of these females are slim and portrayed as flawless creating a pressure amongst the young girls and women to appear like the females in the photographs (Toronto Sun “Top Stories”). The women are pictured as physically attractive right from their youthful and thin appearance to their stylish clothing, hair, and makeup (Liesbet, 6).
The contradictory notion of downplaying the sexuality of females and demanding that they should be attractive place women journalists in a lose-lose situation. The newspapers also focus on gendered advertisements that seek to capture the interests of readers. For example, advertisements about financial institutions or schools in Metro Toronto will occasionally place the prettiest women one has ever seen (Metro Toronto “Top Stories”). The act of using the images ensures that those who are turning the pages of the newspaper or reading online will stop and check the stories or advertisements just to get a better glimpse of the attractive females (Holland, 12).
Apart from the sexuality perspective, there is another way to view the representation of women in the print media. For starters, feminism has long since time in memorial been used to depict maternal caring and emotion. A woman editor or journalist will portray a maternal perspective that provides comfort and care. For example, in the Globe and Mail, it is easy to notice that female editors tackle social issues such as pediatric matters, social evils, and culture, amongst others (The Globe and Mail “Top Stories”). Their stories exude feminism in the sense that they appear drawn from an emotive and caring perspective (Miller and Court, par.5).
According to Otto (160), the maternal ideology places women in their traditional context whereby they were viewed as moral and caring. They provide comfort in the face of devastating news and give the public the assurance of a brighter tomorrow. The repetitive positioning of women in terms of their sexuality and maternal nature in print media carries along the subordination witnessed over the centuries. Females are not traditionally viewed as the sources of information in the community. The role is provided to men; hence, it is difficult to change the perceptions of the society overnight.
The exclusion of females in mass communications is an extension of their marginalization in the community. Women possess a long history of being denied opportunities and rights as well as the inability to command authority. Consequentially, females in the print media industry inhabit a detached professional image of negotiating their objectivity and the seriousness of the cultural expectations of being women (Otto, 164). The inclusion of women’s notions to change their images and the values of the news industry is the first step towards transforming print media. The transformation of the image of females seeks to depict them as competent, valuable, and intelligent. It also grants them the authority to inform the society and speak on behalf of the entire media industry.
Works Cited
American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). The Newspaper Journalists of Leading Newsrooms: Women Journalists, 2015. Web. <http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=415> Accessed January 19, 2017.
Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). Who Makes the News, 2005. Web. <http://whomakesthenews.org/media-monitoring> Accessed January 19, 2017.
Holland, Patricia. "When a woman reads the news" (1987).
Levine, Suzanne Braun. "News-speak and "Genderlect"-(It's Only News If You Can Sell It)." The media and women without apology. New York: Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, 1993.
Liesbet van Zoonen. "One of the girls?: The changing gender of journalism" (1998).
Metro Toronto. Top Stories, 2017. Web. <http://www.metronews.ca/toronto.html>
Miller, John and Caron Court. Who's Telling the News? Race and gender representation in Canada's daily newsrooms. Diversity Collection, 2004. Print.
Otto, Jean. "A Matter of Opinion." Women and Mass Communications in the 1990's, pp 157- 166, 1993.
The Globe and Mail. Top Stories. Web. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/>
Toronto Sun. Top Stories, 2017. Web. <http://www.torontosun.com/>
