Gender equality is much more a private and personal concern among journalists, rather than being codified or recognised explicitly. Respondents acknowledged the importance of the issue, but admitted that the respect for gender equality in media content is limited. In daily practice, timeliness often trumped gender equality when searching for experts.
Women are acutely underrepresented as subjects in Austrian news coverage. Empirical research has confirmed such an inequality repeatedly, over the decades and across various media genres (Thiele, 2019). In their country-level study on news and gender within the framework of the Global Media Monitoring Project, Kirchhoff and Prandner (2015) identified women’s representation in the news as weak. Only 21 per cent of news subjects, reporters, and presenters in the traditional media were female, and even less in Internet-based media. The presence of women as news subjects was high in sections about celebrities, art, and media, and low in economics, politics, and government. The authors of this snapshot content analysis on a single day in March 2015 concluded:
There are significant gender gaps in both the traditional media outlets and the internet. The representation of women in economy (14%) and politics or government stories (18%) is very low compared to the news stories that deal with lifestyle (44%), crime and violence (25%) and social or legal issues (20%). (Kirchhoff & Prandner, 2015: 17)
Another content analysis (Pernegger, 2020) confirms these findings. While women’s representation in politics is stronger than ever (first female prime minister in 2019; first government with equal gender participation among ministers 2019; 39% female members of the Austrian parliament in 2020), popular print media (Kronenzeitung, Österreich, Heute) in particular continued to neglect women’s policy issues even as late as 2019. Regarding gender representation in published pictures, the gender gap is striking (only 31% are women); moreover, such pictures reinforce traditional gender stereotypes.
