Gender equality was seen to be much more of a private and personal concern among journalists, and some are more sensitive to it than others. Our interviewees acknowledged its importance, but admitted that gender equality in media content continues to be limited. In daily practice, time constraints often meant that they turn to the same old and trusted sources. Therefore, although no formal rules exist, there was a general feeling among our interviewees that news stories are now more gender balanced, both when it came to the sources used and to the actors covered in the news stories. Some stylebooks mention gender equality regarding news sources. Our interviewees expressed the idea that female journalists put gender equality higher on the agenda.
The NPO’s performance agreement (Rijksoverheid, 2017: 7) stipulates that it must ensure a balanced representation of women. While NPO is obligated to measure the representation of women in its television and radio broadcasts as part of its performance measurement, it does not have to adhere to quota rules. The representation of women in traditional news media (newspaper, television, and radio) is lower in the Netherlands (19.5%) when compared with worldwide (24%) and European (25%) proportions of the same in the 2015 edition of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) (Women Inc, 2017: 12). Strikingly, Dutch media professionals overestimated the quantum of female experts: 53 per cent of them felt that 20 to 40 per cent of experts are female, although the actual figure is only 12 per cent (Women Inc, 2017). The Media Authority noted that, of all the guests in Dutch news and opinion programmes between 2010 and 2015, only 22 per cent were women (Atria, 2017). Given an increased use of online news media sources, the GMMP has also included the representation of women in the digital news media as one of the aspects to monitor. The percentage of women in the news on four Dutch news sites varied from 9 per cent at nu.nl, to 10 per cent at nos.nl, to 33 per cent at joop.nl. All of these combined asserts that the Netherlands is less advanced in this respect than Europe as a whole (24%) or even when seen in relation to the group of 144 countries surveyed in the world (average = 25%).
