Conclusions

Words have power. TV has power. My pen has power. - Shonda Rhimes

What have we learnt and what can we do?

We started by the premise that women probably are underrepresented in US media and set out to verify this with the help of Quotebank. Of course we hoped in secret that this would not come true and the situation would not be as bad as we thought, but unfortunately the numbers reconfirm what we suspected. Neither in front nor behind the scenes, women’s voices are promoted equally to men’s with almost 65 % of editors among the highest traffic media outlets being controlled by men with left-leaning media pushing to 40% female chief-editors but right-leaning media being even more gender-biased with about 20% female chief-editors.

Still, when it comes to giving women a platform in the media, the situation looks even more grim with less than a fifth of quotes being issued by women. And once one zooms in to what women are asked about, it does not necessarily get better: We clearly see a case of women being overly represented in accounts about personal stories, health and lifestyle while men are left to discuss politics, business, global issues and sports either altogether or at significantly higher proportions. Just as it is not a sign of sincere inclusion when minorities are only asked to comment on minority issues but are kept quiet for all other topics that concern society, women being kept in their niches, although being “dominant” there, has nothing to do with equal female representation. This niche issue becomes even more apparent when studying the portion of quotes specifically mentioning men and women. While sports appears as a topic largely dominated either by male speakers or male protagonists this can hardly be seen as a topic” that reduces men to just that. In contrast, THE female issue in the USA is the ideological battle around reproductive rights , which “nicely” emerges also in the work we have done as a proper topic (out of seven, which already implies quite some generality). While it is important to thematize topics that move society, this becomes problematic if half of the population has to find a place in the limited number of narratives dominating the media landscape. Beyond generally taking less space, the over emphasis on certain topics further engrains the misrepresentation of women and reduces them to their bodily functions (and skills as a mother in the family-work balance question).

Our vision therefore is that if we reconduct this study in 20 years, the topics treated by women have become interchangeable with those of men, by men and all the other minorities for whom we have not even started to investigate represenation, but first and foremost, that the proportion of female speakers represents their above-fifty percent share among the human population… Until then, among the many other battles women have to fight, there is nothing left to do than taking the words of Shona Rhimes as an action plan for change:

"Words have power. TV has power. My pen has power."

-Shonda Rhimes