While UK broadcasters responded to a 2015 House of Lords committee report into the women in news and current affairs broadcasting (on-screen and off-screen) with a range of policy statements and reviews on diversity and inclusiveness within their operations, problems persist in the representation of women in many, but not all, UK national newspapers. Significant imbalances persist in the use of women as expert sources across the media landscape as a whole. While guidelines, policies and monitoring of gender equality and diversity in content are applied by the UK’s public service broadcasters, there is little evidence that this is practiced by newspapers.
The 2015 report by the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications noted a significant imbalance of women experts in broadcast news coverage, and urged broadcasters to take steps to ensure that they better reflected society by ensuring a gender balance (House of Lords, 2015, p.5). A number of reviews and policy changes have been put in place by broadcasters in the interim. The BBC’s Royal Charter (renewed in 2017) specifies one of the Corporation’s Public Purposes as “[t]o reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions” (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016a, p.6). The Corporation has since developed a diversity commissioning code of practice to achieve this (BBC, 2019b) and run a series of ‘Expert Women’ events as part of a campaign to increase the number of expert women presenters and contributors, particularly in topics in which women have been especially underrepresented. The campaign is run with support from other UK broadcasters, including Sky, which does not have defined public service broadcasting obligations set by Ofcom (BBC, 2017).
Other broadcasters have engaged in parallel reviews of on- and off-screen diversity and inclusion, such as ITV’s Social Purpose Impact Report (ITV, 2019a) and Channel 4’s Fourteen Insights into Inclusion & Diversity (Channel 4, 2019). Together, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky use the online system Diamond to monitor consistent diversity data on programmes that they commission. Diamond reports contain breakdowns by broadcaster for the proportion of on-screen contributions for different groups: for example, 55.8 per cent of on-screen contributions in BBC programming were by women. This compares with 54.7 per cent for ITV, 49.5 per cent for Channel 4, 45.6 per cent for Sky and 44.7 per cent for Channel 5 (Diamond, 2020, p.13).
A 2018 study commissioned by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that just 23 per cent of expert sources across UK news outlets were women, with women especially unlikely to be cited as expert sources in stories about business and finance (14 per cent of expert sources), foreign politics (13 per cent) and considerably more likely to feature in stories about social policy (48 per cent of expert sources) (Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, 2018, p.2).
Research produced in 2017 by Women in Journalism, a network for women working in UK print, broadcast and online media, found that print media were lagging behind broadcasters in redressing gender imbalances in content production and coverage. It also found that portrayals of women on the front pages of UK tabloid newspapers tended towards sexualized coverage and photographs, with women in newspapers “more likely to appear as victims or arm candy” (Mills, Hind & Quinn, 2017, p.13). Research on representations of women politicians in UK newspapers similarly found that stories tended to focus on aspects of their personal lives, appearance and gender, rather than on their policies or expertise (Williams, 2018).
