Women-Owned Media Matters, Here's Why We Need Your Support
It’s all too rare to have a media platform that is founded by and run by women. Just try to think of a few of the women-focused platforms (or even general news platforms) and take a second to look up who owns them. Surprised?
Newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and male. Ownership of media publications follows the same trend. The result is a media landscape that looks much like this:
Women made up a mere 19 percent of experts featured in news stories, meanwhile, 69 percent of newswire bylines are written by men compared to just 31 percent by women.
Print media is only 41 percent women and men are 59 percent. When it comes to digital media, the numbers are similar with 40 percent women and 60 percent men.
Women of color represent just 7.95 percent of U.S. print newsroom staff, 12.6 percent of local TV news staff, and 6.2 percent of local radio staff.
This research is according to The Status of Women in the U.S. Media report for 2019, and the status of women of color in the U.S. news media 2018. Ownership data is not even tracked, save for commercial TV stations in which they found 7.4 percent of them to be women-owned. The data is reported by the F.C.C.
“When women’s expert and authoritative voices are accurately reflected and harmful gender stereotypes left behind, we all benefit. Girls – and boys – grow up in a world where they learn they can participate equally. Gender bias in schools, workplaces and communities are diminished,” explained an article on the topic from the World Economic Forum.
This is why now more than ever it is important to support women, and Black-owned media. With this in mind, Her Agenda launched a crowdfunding campaign to ask the community to invest in us through donations that will go toward paying more women journalists and writers.
To kick off the crowdfund, Caress donated funds through a grant in partnership with iFundWomen. The fundraising campaign runs until August 24th. We’re doing this to ensure the growth of women’s voices in media, which in turn impacts us all.
“The mass media provide the guiding myths that shape our perception of the world and serve as important instruments of control,” according to Stuart Hall’s cultural studies theory. This theory essentially finds that whoever creates that information is important, and “power and power structures in society play a major role in how information is disseminated and interpreted especially when disseminated amongst different groups in society.”
“Media tells us what is important and who matters, and when the wires assign 69% of the stories to men, the message is clear where women stand,” says Julia Burton of WMC in an interview with the Independent.
We could not agree more. The gender imbalance in media has been proven to have a direct correlation to women’s underrepresentation in the workplace, and reinforces harmful gender stereotypes.
We need a more representative media not just within newsrooms, but also within ownership circles. We need to normalize ambitious and powerful women. Her Agenda’s team of leaders and contributors is 99% women, with a core team of 4, and a contributor network of 100 women.
Let’s support them today. Any amount helps. Donate via our iFundWomen page here: https://ifundwomen.com/projects/her-agenda.
[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Her Agenda.]
