The Netherlands is ranked 6th on the Gender Equality Index, and 3rd in the “employment” domain (EIGE, 2019a, 2019b). Interviewee Jo Bardoel mentioned a tremendously positive evolution in this regard, in the last ten to twenty years. There is no indication that women are currently paid less than men, although more female than male journalists do tend to work part-time. It was also observed that women also tended to work more on “soft” topics such as fashion and lifestyle, in contrast to men working on “hard” topics such as crime, politics, and finance.
Strikingly, none of the interviewees could provide a very clear answer to the question: “Are men and women in the media equal in terms of compensation?” This may indicate that internal gender equality is not very high on the agenda, a view supported by the lack of any explicit language regarding staff gender diversity in the NPO’s performance agreement (Rijksoverheid, 2017). Moreover, in putting together a panel of 16 interviewees, we were only able to find four female respondents. Female inequality seems to be viewed as a thing of the past, with one of the two female editors-in-chief we interviewed stating that gender was not an issue for them. However, one of them also said that only 35 per cent of her staff were female, a figure she would like to see increase and an issue that she would bear in mind as part of future recruitment procedures.
