When it comes to television journalism, how does gender-based bias impact representations of women? If you’re interested in this question, here’s an article you may enjoy.
In this study, the authors turn their attention to a specific context in Portugal to reveal how assumptions about gender, as well as language and workplace environment, play into how gender may be communicated and performed. Gender is tied to cultural contexts, and while some change has taken place, the researchers draw attention to how specific challenges are impacting the pace and speed of change. Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Observing gender in the newsroom: insights from an ethnographic study
Peer-reviewed research by: Maria João Silveirinha, Paula Lobo and Rita Basílio Simões
A large body of research has documented gender bias in the news coverage of women. Despite small gains in recent years, namely on television, and the growing percentage of females in the workforce, substantial underrepresentation of women in the news has remained. To explore journalists’ social and professional world as a milieu of the lived professional and culturally grounded understandings of gender, we conducted participant observation of a television newsroom. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, our study explored daily interactions and communicative performances, focusing on how gender is built in everyday work encounters in ways that may be connected to potential changes in the practices of gender representations. The study identified three primary themes: newsroom environment, gender assumptions, and issues of language. Our findings support that gender is not given but performed mostly according to institutionalised common practices following gender expectations and presuppositions, making change more difficult and slower than necessary. Future research should complement the limitations of the cultural generalizability of our study. Recommendations include the study of gender construction in relation to other components of gender as a social institution and gender in television journalism practice.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2023 in the Feminist Media Studies.
Full Reference //
Silveirinha, M. J., Lobo, P., & Simões, R. B. (2023). Observing gender in the newsroom: insights from an ethnographic study. Feminist Media Studies, 1-17.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Knowledge Stitch amplifies open-access peer-reviewed academic research. If you have research you would like readers to check out, click here to suggest your work.