The journalists interviewed agreed that gender equality in media content was important, but there was a lack of monitoring, with one exception: the public broadcasting service RÚV monitors the gender ratio in its news content and all its programmes, and the findings are published regularly on their website (RÚV, 2020). At other outlets, journalists mentioned they tried to make sure there was gender equality in the content, but that it was an informal practice. There were no formal mechanisms to monitor this in private media.
In their country study on news and gender within the framework of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), Jóhannsdóttir and Einarsdóttir (2015) found that women were grossly under-represented in the news. Only 20 per cent of news subjects in news on traditional and online platforms were women, down from 28 per cent in GMMP 2010. However, women were no less likely than men to feature as news subjects in so-called hard news. The situation appears to have improved since, and in research done for the Icelandic Association of Women in Business, women were 33 per cent of subjects in broadcasting news and 35 per cent in current affairs programmes in 2017 (Beck, 2017). Preliminary results from GMMP’s latest study in 2020 indicate that women were around one-third of the subjects in the main news media. According to RÚV’s own content monitoring, the gender ratio was equal overall in all programmes in 2020, but in news, the story was different: 61 per cent of news subjects were men and 40 per cent were women (RÚV, 2020).
