Last year we reported that UK news coverage of women-focused issues was down a fifth in five years. We wondered how much focus women-centric issues are receiving within the coverage of the general election (GE) campaign and to answer this question audience strategy consultancy AKAS analysed the online news GDELT database of stories mentioning the general election.

The analysis of 171,500 online articles from over 2,000 national and local UK news outlets (see below for full methodology) has revealed a decline in coverage that includes key gender-related terms of relevance to women, compared to the previous two GE campaign periods.

In addition, women are now less likely to be interviewed as sources, protagonists, or experts in online coverage than they were in 2017 and 2019.

Nevertheless, there is still time for journalists to expand their lens to cover parties’ plans to narrow the societal disadvantages women face. This article offers suggestions as to how.

The diminishing GE coverage of structural disadvantages that women face

Since the last general election in December 2019 progress in closing the gender pay gap has slowed dramatically, dropping a mere 0.6 percentage points from 14.9% in 2020 to 14.3% in 2023 and increasing marginally for full-time female employees from 7% in 2020 to 7.7% in 2023.

The latest data shows that women account for only 6% of FTSE 350 CEOs and 13.8% of executive directors in the UK. Meanwhile, a survey among British women since 2019 has shown that three quarters believe that more should be done to achieve a gender balance in politics.

Yet, despite these undisputed gender gaps, AKAS has found no GE news coverage during either the current or the previous two election campaigns that has mentioned terms such as “women’s rights”, “gender wealth gap”, “women’s pay”, or “women’s experiences”.

The term “gender pay gap” has received negligible attention in all three elections, particularly in the current one (0.01% of all coverage this year mentioned the term vs. 0.17% in 2019 and 0.15% in 2017).

Indeed, the term “gender gap” has barely been used in any of the coverage (0.01% in 2024 vs. 0.19% in 2019), highlighting how little the structural disadvantages that women face attract the attention of news outlets.

The word “women” has also declined in news coverage: whereas 10.74% of all GE-related online articles contained the term in 2019, just 6.14% do now. Use of the word “female” has similarly declined from 3.0% in 2019 to 1.6% this year.

“Gender equality” has barely been used (up from 0.05% in 2019 to 0.14% so far this year) while “gender inequality”, which featured in 0.2% of GE-related coverage in 2019, has so far disappeared from this year’s coverage.

Overall, GE coverage featuring a raft of gender-related terms of importance to women has declined from 0.63% of all GE-related coverage during 2017’s campaign to 0.37% currently.

Earlier this month, a Metropolitan Police report revealed that one in ten people in England and Wales (predominantly women and girls) are victims of violence, warning that the scale of violence against women and girls is beyond the police’s contracting capacity. Yet the terms “violence against women” and “domestic violence” have been mentioned in just 0.48% of all GE coverage, a modest increase from 2017 and 2019. While this increase, brought about by references in some parties’ manifestos, is welcome, the level remains low compared to the endemic scale of the problem.

The term “sexual violence” has been completely absent from this year’s coverage, having received minimal attention in the previous two GE campaigns’ coverage (0.042% in 2017 and 0.027% in 2019). This absence stands against a backdrop of the vast majority of GB adults (82%) believing that more should be done in relation to talking openly about/addressing sexual misconduct and 92% of women who run having been concerned for their physical safety last year.

Women’s share of voice in GE election coverage is marginal and smaller than in previous campaigns

Women’s share of voice in news election coverage has declined considerably from the last two GE campaigns. So far, 40% of online GE-related news articles have quoted men, increasing from 29% in 2017 and 38% in 2019. By contrast, only 15% of this campaign’s articles have quoted women.

Currently, for every woman quoted in GE news coverage, 2.74 men are quoted, a ratio worse than in both previous campaigns (1:2.47 in 2019 and 1:1.68 in 2017).

The increase in men’s share of voice in the coverage of this GE campaign can partly be explained by the increased proportion of male party leaders compared to the previous two elections. However, attributing the decrease in women’s voices solely to a structurally male-dominated political scene, as journalists sometimes do, would be inaccurate.

AKAS’ analysis of men’s share of voice in GE articles that do not mention any of the main party leaders reveals a sustained prevalence of male voices, albeit at a lower ratio (2.2 men to 1 woman instead of 2.7 to 1 for all GE coverage).

What’s more, even when Theresa May was fighting the 2017 GE elections as prime minister, only 18% of stories quoted women vs. 29% that quoted men.

Regarding gender equality issues, journalism does not hold those in power sufficiently to account for the structural disadvantages that women continue to experience in the UK. Instead, the low levels of attention given to these issues suggest that UK journalism acts as a mirror to society, reflecting the prevalent public mood, party manifestos and male-favouring social norms.

For example, the word “family” has increased significantly in GE coverage (from 8.47% in 2019 to 14.65% in 2024), reflecting the general global shift towards more traditional values that emphasise the importance of the family as an institution.

Interestingly, the word “childcare”, so key to the empowerment of millions of women, has been mentioned significantly less this year than in the 2109 campaign (0.64% of GE coverage vs. 4.1%).

How to expand the journalistic lens to include more women in election coverage

With two weeks of general election-related coverage to go, there are far too many questions that reporters are yet to ask about parties’ plans to improve women’s lives. Important overarching questions would concern how policies would impact women and men differently and each party’s plans to close the existing wide gender gaps. Questions abound with regard to each, for example:

Health

What will parties do to improve women’s reproductive healthcare at different life stages, covering contraception, maternity care, childcare, and menopause? How will parties support women’s and men’s differing needs in mental health and wellbeing?

Safety

How will parties curtail physical and online violence, harassment, threats and stalking, which affect women disproportionately to men?

Pay

How will parties close the pay gap for women across different age groups? Or reduce the broader enormous wealth gap (now $105trn worldwide, according to a recent Oxfam report), including the pension gap? What childcare programmes are they envisaging? How will they combat sick pay inequality?

Leadership/power

How will parties narrow the leadership gap, which is currently overwhelmingly in favour of men in all major sectors?

To seek answers to these and other questions and given that only 30% of MP candidates are women (down from 34.8% currently), journalists must be deliberate in their sourcing of experts, ensuring that for every male politician/story protagonist, reporters interview a woman expert from each party or civil society.

If pressed for time, use source lists of women experts like this one. Trading off seniority for deep expertise is a safe way of capturing much-needed women’s perspectives in the remaining weeks of GE coverage.

Note on GDELT methodology: The GDELT Project (The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone) is a searchable database of news articles and events published in multiple languages around the world. GDELT Summary is the front-end interface of the searchable tool which enables searches of articles from 2017 to the present day using RSS feeds from news sites worldwide. The UK GDELT tracks online articles from over 2,000 news and information providers including BBC News, ITV News, Sky News, The Guardian, The Independent, The I, The Times, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Star, The Express, The Metros, and nations brands in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as local news providers. Some notable exceptions appear to be The Sun and the FT. If that is the case, they will be added to the database in the updated version of GDELT in Summer 2024.

The post Women’s voices and issues are not being heard in UK general election appeared first on Press Gazette.

Ever since I started working in the media industry two decades ago – initially as a research expert – the question of how to engage young audiences with news has been one of the most frequently deliberated issues within news organisations and at news conferences. We all agree that the news industry must do better. But I did not appreciate just how poorly the industry had done in the last decade until I researched this article: since 2013, millennials’ and Gen Z’s engagement with news has simply collapsed.

In the UK, interest in news among all adults has declined by a quarter since 2013, while it has halved for under-35s, with data indicating that the younger the news consumer, the less interested they are in the current news offer.

While the Reuters Institute Digital News Reports showed 64% of under-35s (and 59% of 18-24s) claiming to be extremely or very interested in news in 2013, by 2023 those figures fell to 32% of under-35s.

The picture is similar in the US, where 36% of under-35s (and 27% of 18-24s) now claim to be extremely or very interested in the news vs. the majority (56%) in 2013.

If the current trend continues it is possible that by 2034 less than 10% of under-35s will be extremely or very interested in the news in. the UK and USA.

Percentage of 18-34s extremely or very interested in news in the UK & USA (2013 to 2023)

Among news outlets, the research narratives on how to appeal to younger audiences have typically centred on which platforms (e.g. Tiktok, Instagram) or what news formats to use to land different news stories.

Rarely have they centred on how to make the big and important stories relevant to millennials or Gen Z, and almost never on identifying and eliminating the organisational challenges that lead to producing news that disengages younger generations.

Put simply, younger generations are not seeing themselves reflected in the news often enough. The newly-released Next Gen News report, based on 45 ethnographic deep dives with 18-25 year-olds from across the globe, argues that their news needs are not sufficiently met.

Part of the problem is the storytelling distance between news providers and their younger audiences that manifests in insufficiently relevant stories/story angles and inaccessible language, which generate a feeling of disempowerment that causes younger audiences to recoil.

Why are news organisations disconnected from young audiences?

Why are those who make the news increasingly disconnected from millennials and Gen Z? Too often it comes down to editors and reporters being of a different generation and background.

According to the Worlds of Journalism study (2013-2023), journalists’ average age is 43 in the UK and 47 in the US. They are also likely to be highly educated: 86% of journalists in the UK hold a university degree.

In addition, editors and reporters are more likely to be men. In 2024, men accounted for 60% of journalists across 12 markets studied by the Reuters Institute (including the UK and US), and 76% of top editors across 240 news brands globally. In countries with multiracial populations top editors are also much more likely to be white.

It is perhaps no surprise then that the news tends to overserve the over-represented group of men who are older, white, educated and richer (MOWERs). Their relatively homogenous lived experiences bring a raft of biases that inhibit progress when it comes to serving the young. If left unchecked, they make it inevitable that millennials and Gen Z will remain underserved. Amongst the different biases in play, two are highly significant: in-group favouritism and youngism.

In-group favouritism shows up in our unconscious affinity towards and rewarding of those who look and think like us. This bias is universal and not confined to one group. Consequently, the over-represented group of MOWERs, who diverge significantly from millennials and Gen Z, are more likely to dictate what constitutes a story, to navigate successfully the unwritten cultural rules that their cohort has established within the news outlet, to promote other MOWERs faster, and to overserve audiences who look and think like them.

Youngism is essentially the reverse ageism that affects younger journalists and editors within news outlets. It manifests in an authority gap between younger and older leaders/journalists, with competence being disproportionately attributed to age.

Often it combines with gender bias, resulting in a wider credibility gap between young female journalists/editors and their older colleagues. Younger editors and journalists are also more likely to be judged purely on their last project, a phenomenon known as prove-it-again bias. Similarly, young women are more likely to experience lookism which links their perceived value to their appearance.

All these biases lead to substantive organisational challenges, including the under-representation of young editors and reporters, the intersectional invisibility of young female employees, and content of reduced relevance to young audiences.

Which news outlets are doing best at attracting younger audiences?

Are some UK and US outlets serving younger audiences better than others? To answer this question, AKAS ran analysis using Similarweb data from January 2024, measuring the absolute reach and percentage profile of under-35s for the top 25 UK and top 49 US newsbrands (those for which age data was available).

In each country, three newsbrands dominate in terms of absolute numbers of website visits from under-35s: BBC (225 million, although this includes everything at BBC.com including entertainment), The Guardian (139 million) and the Daily Mail (116 million) in the UK, and The New York Times (253 million), MSN (220 million) and CNN (167 million) in the US.

Three of these news outlets also attract a higher proportion of visits from under-35s than the average: 39% for the BBC and Guardian and 40% for NYT, compared to the 35% UK and 32% US averages.

In the UK, the top three performing brands in terms of proportion (but not volume) of visits from under-35s are Channel 4 (46%), ITV (41%) and Evening Standard (41%). Figures for Channel 4 and ITV both include their entertainment offerings, not just news. In the US the top three are Wired (48%), Esquire (47%) and Vice (47%).

For comparison, 18-34s made up 27% of the UK adult population in 2022 and 29% in the US - although data also shows the young are much more likely to be online than older audiences.

How to get millennials and Gen Z interested in news

There are numerous solutions to improving millennials’ and Gen Z’s interest in the news. But they rely on news leaders recognising and accepting the existence of inherent organisational biases that hold the news outlet back from getting the best out of its young workforce and from serving better the needs of young news audiences. Three stand out as worth sharing here.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, is the need to endorse a deliberate age-diverse approach to the strategy and values within an organisation, including setting targets for young reporters, editors and audiences, as well as tracking output performance disaggregated by age.

Secondly, fostering intergenerational, mixed-gender professional relationships and teams is key. Recent research shows that age diversity in the workplace yields better organisational performance, including better engagement and satisfaction. Thus news outlets that adopt this approach are more likely to succeed in delivering engaging news that interests millennials and Gen Z.

Thirdly, to learn from and empathise with each other, news leadership teams should create voluntary mentoring and reverse-mentoring programmes for editors and journalists. These programmes would facilitate a much-needed and currently lacking intergenerational understanding of audience needs.

In the words of a senior news leader I interviewed for the From Outrage to Opportunity report into missing perspectives in news: “Some of the younger people coming in now are coming in with a much, much firmer and more passionate sense of identity, and the stories and things that aren’t being talked about. We need to go to those people and say, ‘What are we missing here?’”

Millennials and Gen Z hold the key to their own news engagement. All they need is a news industry that sees, listens to and consults them.

The post How under-35s’ interest in news has collapsed and what we can do about it appeared first on Press Gazette.

The ten most-visited news websites globally are all experiencing a decline in traffic: this was the year-on-year position in May, as highlighted in the latest Press Gazette ranking.

This worrying insight is a wake-up call for the news industry, signifying the pressure it is under. But it also highlights the opportunity for news outlets to find new audiences.

Attracting more women audiences, who, as reported by Richard Addy in From Outrage to Opportunity, are currently underserved by the industry, seems to be the lowest-hanging fruit. As an example, if newspaper organisations globally increased women’s consumption of news by one percentage point a year, this would generate an additional $11bn over the next five years and $38bn over the next ten.

To understand this growth opportunity presenting itself to the industry, my audience strategy consultancy AKAS used Similarweb data from the last month where demographic data was available to analyse the gender consumption gaps of the most-visited news websites. In other words, we compared visits by men and by women to each of the websites and calculated the difference between them to find out whether there was a gap in favour of either gender.

We found that across the top 48 out of the most visited 53 news websites URLs where data was available in May 2023, 60.1% of visits were made by men, indicating an average gender consumption gap of 20.2 percentage points (ppt). (Data was not available for edition.cnn.com (although it was for cnn.com), news.google.com, news.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com or news.sky.com.)

Analysis of a larger sample of 3,174 websites from across the world in May revealed an even larger gender consumption gap of 22 percentage points.

Fox News has biggest opportunity to grow female audience

Seven of the top ten news websites globally have their data disaggregated by gender on Similarweb. All seven have more visits from men.

The consumption gap of 39 percentage points is largest for foxnews.com where 69.5% of all visitors are men and 30.5% are women. Foxnews.com’s consumption gap is the second largest among the top 48 sites (behind only aggregator newsnow.co.uk) and the largest among the 29 generalist news websites in the top 48.

Among the top ten news sites, cnn.com registered the second largest gap of 23.2 percentage points (behind foxnews.com) in favour of men. It was followed by dailymail.com (20.6 ppt), msn.com (20.2 ppt), bbc.com (19 ppt), theguardian.com (16.4 ppt), bbc.co.uk (15.9 ppt) and nytimes.com (9 ppt).

It is important to highlight that the two BBC websites are not solely focused on news, but include other, traditionally women-friendly genres such as entertainment, children’s, comedy and drama (defined by AKAS as News+), which may be suppressing the news gender consumption gap.

Men's higher news consumption most pronounced on politics sites

AKAS also analysed the gender consumption gap by sub-genre by overlaying the news genre onto each of the top news websites. Our analysis revealed that the gap is largest for politics news websites, with a consumption gap in favour of men of 36.2 percentage points, followed by news agency visits (31.1 ppt) and business sites (26.8 ppt). Four of the five sites with the largest consumption gaps between men and women are politics and news agency websites.

Analysis of business news websites reveals similarly high gender consumption gaps, with men again accounting for the majority of the visits on cnbc.com (30.1 ppt difference in favour of men), bloomberg.com (31 ppt) and wsj.com (28.3 ppt)

While conducting research for From Outrage to Opportunity, we found that across our six countries of focus in the global north and south, men dominated the most senior roles in the highest-profile beats. For example, men occupy three in four of the most senior editorial roles in politics and two in three in business/economics.

The stereotypical assignment of editorial roles that confines women editors primarily to the so-called “soft” lower-profile beats may be suppressing women’s consumption of high-profile news genres such as politics, business and foreign affairs.

Globally, women have a higher level of interest than men in 11 out of 16 news genres and lower interest in just five news genres – politics, business, international news, sports and science/technology. Men’s dominance in the most senior editorial roles leads to men’s news interests being overserved and women’s underserved.

Growth opportunity for lifestyle sites is among men

Using Press Gazette’s categorisation, we found that four of the top 48 news websites were more likely to have visits from women than men. Three of these fall within AKAS’ lifestyle category.

Cosmopolitan.com’s visits break down to 61% women vs. 39% men, inverting in favour of women the average gender consumption gap of 22 percentage points across news sites. Similarly, hellomagazine.com’s gender gap of 17.1 percentage points and people.com’s gap of 11.9 ppt are also in favour of women.

The lifestyle genre is typically edited more gender equitably: as reported in The Missing Perspectives of Women in News, according to ICFJ’s global 2019 survey, lifestyle was the only beat out of 19 which had reached gender parity in terms of its journalists. In all other beats, the majority of journalists were men. This more equitable editing has contributed to women’s needs being served better in outlets specialising in lifestyle.

How to attract more female audiences without alienating male audiences?

Many strategic steps are available to news organisations to grow their female audiences. But in my 15-year experience of working in the industry, I have rarely witnessed a news outlet having a strategy for growing its female audience, which undoubtedly is a lost opportunity.

Amedia in Norway is the only outlet that springs to mind and their successful case study has been presented in From Outrage to Opportunity alongside 12 solution themes for making news more gender equitable. Among them, the following could constitute first steps:

• Track women’s engagement and consumption

The first and most important step that most news organisations overlook it to disaggregate audience performance data by gender and track female versus male news consumption and engagement.

Often leadership teams’ underlying assumption is that men’s and women’s news habits are not dissimilar enough to break down. However, they are. And the only way to understand how to serve women and men well is to understand how their needs converge and, crucially, diverge.

• Develop a business plan for increasing revenue from women audiences while retaining men

Decide how to tackle the issue of women’s underrepresentation at every level of the news value chain: at leadership and newsroom level, in newsgathering and news coverage, and in consumption.

Our research shows that the better represented women are at each stage of the news cycle, the bigger the female news audience is.

• Research and develop women-friendly news products and formats

The news industry has defaulted to men’s news habits, needs and consumption patterns for so long that women’s news needs and habits are understood much less well. The scarce research available shows that women can consume news differently.

News outlets that aspire to attracting more women audiences must tailor news propositions to their specific needs.

• Track the success of any women-inclusive news strategy to refine the business plan

News outlets should consider locking in the business plan to grow their female audience at a strategy level to ensure buy-in among both leadership and grassroots journalists. Trailblazing organisations like the BBC, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Amedia and Mint, who have succeeded in improving women’s representation in news coverage and/or news leadership, have highlighted the importance of shared responsibility across the organisation for doing so.

Our research has also highlighted the importance of attaching targets to each element in the business strategy and measuring these. Tracking the performance of the strategy will help to refine its success.

No gain is too small. Drop by drop the river rises.

The post The gender consumption gap for online news and how publishers can address it appeared first on Press Gazette.

The American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit once said: “Who is heard and who is not defines the status quo…”. On International Women’s Day, I ask myself whose worries, stories and voices have been heard in the news in recent years.

According to the latest World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, the UK dropped from 15th to 22nd place in the country ranking between 2018 and 2022 exposing a widening inequality between men and women in British society. In the same period, the proportion of online news stories referencing gender-related terms decreased in the UK from 0.9% to 0.5%.

A similar but less dramatic decline in coverage also occurred globally. From Outrage to Opportunity, launched in November 2022, exposed the positive relationship between how much society values women and how much the news industry amplifies their voices.

[Read more: Women of colour ‘effectively invisible’ in UK and US news industries]

To understand these trends further, my consultancy AKAS and I analysed the use of dozens of terms relevant to women in the news by interrogating the GDELT online news database that includes one billion news stories globally and 34 million in the UK, amassed in the last six years.

Our most significant finding is that online news coverage of issues of high relevance to women in the UK and globally has remained consistently marginal. In 2022, only 2.6% of online news coverage in the UK (vs 2.1% globally) focused on issues of importance to women such as sexual violence, childbearing, reproductive health, gender-based discrimination or gender equality. By comparison, 24% and 19% of online coverage globally was business and politics related.

2018 was a crucial year for women. UK and global coverage of the aforementioned issues reached a high at 3.3% and 2.5% of all online coverage, respectively. The #MeToo movement, which was reignited in October 2017 and peaked in 2018, was an important anchor point for women globally. The movement’s ripples reverberated through news coverage, leading to more focus on violence against women and spilling over into other women-centric issues, before being pushed out into the peripheral vision of journalism again.

2020, the first year of the pandemic, saw news coverage of issues relevant to women fall to its lowest level since data collection began in 2017. Despite women’s safety, reproductive health, and their work and home lives being affected by the pandemic disproportionately negatively, news stories containing terms reflecting these issues declined sharply in 2020 compared to 2018 – by 67% in the UK and by 44% globally.

During the first wave of Covid-19, women experienced a quadruple structural bind that marginalised their perspectives severely in news coverage about the pandemic.

Firstly, women’s representation was marginalised in top political/governmental and science response committees. Secondly, at the start of the pandemic the news industry framed the story in war terms, and since war is traditionally seen as a “men’s domain”, women were pushed further out of news focus. Thirdly, the reporting of the story was shifted from health editors, more likely to be women, to political and economy/business editors, more likely to be men. Fourthly, reporters on the ground – driven by punishing filing deadlines – reverted to well-established sources who tended to be men.

In 2021 and 2022, online news coverage referencing women-centred terms in the UK and globally crept back up. However, it failed to reach its 2018 levels. Online news containing references to different forms of gender violence, gender/racial diversity, childbirth and, more broadly, gender gaps, was still lower in 2022 than in 2018. Last year, the use of major terms around these issues in the news was approximately 21% lower in the UK and 15% lower globally than in 2018.

My investigation into news coverage trends in the last six years also found a diminishing use of gender and race-sensitive terms like “gender equality”, “racial diversity” or “feminism” in the UK, as well as “MeToo” and “Black Lives Matter”. Might this reflect journalism’s tense and eroding relationship with gender and racial egalitarianism? Testing this hypothesis would need further research, but what these trends definitively highlight is that news media is not at the forefront of the more progressive societal forces, as frequently assumed by the industry itself. News industry’s attention to diversity has been dialled down in coverage and is now in need of urgent care. The research conducted for my latest report reported some backlash among news leaders against news organisations’ efforts aimed at improving the representation or inclusion of people of colour in news.

There are some gender-centric topic areas which have been covered more recently. For example, in the last year, there has been a minor uplift in the use of terms like “trans”, “menopause” and “endometriosis”. This uplift has not been observed globally and may be pointing to a rising rudimentary interest in these topics specifically in the UK. The use of terms like “women” or “female” in conjunction with “leadership” has also enjoyed a small uplift in coverage in the UK while sustaining a global decline. This may partly be a function of the fact that two of the country’s four Prime Ministers in the last four years – Theresa May and Liz Truss (albeit briefly) – have been women.

The scarce focus of news coverage on gender-sensitive topics shines a light on the lower value that news media across the globe places on issues of high relevance to women. One such striking example is the failure of global and UK news media to recognise the need to report more frequently the structural causes fuelling violence against women and its endemic nature.

Crucially, this analysis has revealed that the news industry mostly reflects, rather than challenges, lingering male-favouring social norms in British society. Perhaps we can take solace in the fact that being aware of the blind spots is the first step to a much-needed change that will give women greater prominence in news. The next step is for journalism to widen its lens.

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