Similar to editorial and management positions, women are clearly underrepresented in reporting. Women are not very visible as active subjects, and with age, they disappear from reporting. According to the GMMP study, 76 per cent of the people mentioned in the daily news are men and only 24 per cent are women. In the traditional print media, the mention of women was at 23 per cent, still slightly lower than in electronic media. In the NZZ, the newspaper by and for elites, the proportion of women dropped to 13 per cent. On Twitter channels, on the other hand, women and men are mentioned about equally often. There are also differences between the language regions. In French-speaking Switzerland, women are mentioned more often (30%) than in German-speaking Switzerland (20%) or in the Italian-speaking part of the country (18%). Women are mentioned or quoted below average in economic, political, and public affairs topics and in their role as experts, commentators, or activists. Following the spectacular women’s strike, political scientist Fabrizio Gilardi of the University of Zurich analysed the elections to the National Council and Council of States in Switzerland in October 2019 through 54,000 articles in 84 media titles. He found a double disadvantage, as only 41 per cent of the electoral lists were held by women, and in terms of journalism, they received 32 per cent of the newspaper articles. In other words: the “democracy-relevant” newspapers do not correct the under-representation of women, but rather reinforce it. In concrete terms, for the FDP women this means:
In the FDP, for example, 42 per cent of the candidacies are female, but only 30 per cent of the mentions of FDP candidacies in the media are from women. Men are therefore taken up, named and quoted significantly more often. If we exclude party president Petra Gössi from the FDP, the proportion of female nominations drops to 22 per cent, just under a fifth. This figure is only undercut by the SVP, where women are mentioned in only 17 per cent of media reports (and then it is often Magdalena Martullo-Blocher). (Gilardi, 2019; see also Fiechtner et al., 2016)
The hypothesis that male journalists prefer men and powerful women, while female media professionals do not mention women more often than men, is a bold one.
Especially with regard to gender equality, the conclusions of the GMMP study are not very optimistic. The 2015 results show that leading news media still convey a very traditional image of the sexes. Women who appear in the news are often portrayed not in their professional but in their family roles. Only in 3 per cent of news, role models are presented atypically, while in 97 per cent of news, traditional role models are transported (GMMP, 2015). What is striking is the discrepancy between the high employment of Swiss women and their role as employees, which is hardly ever seen in the media. Only in articles on celebrities from the media and sport do women make up an above-average proportion (GMMP, 2015). According to our conclusion, the “glass ceiling” is still a reality and can probably only be broken in the particularly resilient Swiss media structures through targeted control measures within and outside media organisations.
