Does a source equality campaign change the representation of women? An assessment of four levels of source inequality

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AN EQUALITY CAMPAIGN’S EFFECT ON FEMALE REPRESENTATION 1

Does a source equality campaign

change the representation

of women?

An assessment of four levels of source inequality

By Ida Munch

Graduate School of Communication - Master’s programme Communication Science. Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalisation.

Master Thesis

Student id: 12367680

Supervisor: Penny Sheets Thibaut, PhD Wordcount: 7.486

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Index

ABSTRACT ... 2

INTRODUCTION ... 3

DOES REPRESENTATION MATTER? ... 5

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? ... 6

WHO GETS A VOICE? ... 8

THE POWER OF VERBS ... 11

SAMPLE AND METHOD... 13

SAMPLE ... 13 CODING PROCESS ... 15 FINDINGS... 17 DISCUSSION ... 27 REFERENCES ... 32 APPENDIX ... 36

Detailed selection criteria for articles ... 36

Reporting verbs ... 36

Verb dispersion professionals ... 36

Verb dispersion experience ... 37

Verbs translated ... 38

Table displaying Logistic Regression Analysis on topic... 40

Codebook ... 40

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to look into how the Danish newspaper Politiken’s goal to achieve gender equality in their use of sources by 2018 has affected not only how many female sources Politiken has, but also how they are depicted. Using Politiken’s initiative as a starting point, this study explores how women are represented, in which topics they get their voices heard, whether they are used as a knowledge- or experience-based source and which verbs are used to describe them compared to their male counterparts. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on eight constructed weeks, four from the year prior to the campaign (2014)

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and four from the year after (2018) to track the progress. The findings show that the source equality campaign did not have any positive effect on Politiken’s use of sources - actually, it was the contrary - and when looking at the topics covered, and the verbs used to describe the genders, it is evident that stereotypical gender values are manifested in the newspaper. Female sources are described more passive and uncertain than the male ones, and are less frequently featured as expert sources, in addition the continued relative lack of visibility of women sources. This study shows that despite Politiken’s good intentions, source inequality persists. Furthermore, the proportion of male and female sources is not the only form of inequality present in the news. This is an awareness that needs to not only spread through media outlets but also in media research, since the focus thus far largely focuses on source percentages; the risk is that news media ‘hide’ behind high percentages, but actually still reflect the same stigma to women.

Introduction

More and more news organisations such as the BBC and Financial Times are becoming aware of the skewed ways, they use males and females as sources. The outlets are realizing that “journalists aren’t being neutral (…) They are allowing sexism to help dictate their sources — and are perpetuating the problem” (Leonhardt, 2018, p. 1). In 2015, the Danish newspaper

Politiken found that only 24% of their sources were female (Funch, 2015). As a result, they

launched a campaign to reach equal use of male and female sources by January 2018. In December 2017, Politiken announced that they would not reach their goal in time, though they claimed about 40% of their sources were now female (Skarhede, 2017). The newspaper also addressed their use of racial minorities, though this is not assessed in this paper, due to the need for other methods to examine this well.

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Studies have shown that the way journalists use and depict sources can further the gender bias (e.g. Bell, 1991; Hansen, Littwitz, & Sczesny, 2016). Similar to Politiken’s approach, media research on news source gender mainly focuses on the dispersion of the genders and (to a lesser extent) the topics in which they are represented. Females tend to be overrepresented in stories on education, human interest, consumer and fashion news (De Swert & Hooghe, 2010; Humprecht & Esser, 2017; van Zoonen, 1994) and females are mostly used as ‘experience-based’ sources (Bell, 1991; Fowler, 1991), thus talking from their experience not their knowledge. Fowler (1991) argued that this is due to the fact that men tend to have higher and more powerful positions in society, though this argument does not hold up in Denmark, a very gender-equal country (Worlds Economic Forum, 2018) with a high representation of women in politics, science and the business sector (Dansk Statistik, 2019). Quotas, such as the ones Politiken has used, could be a solution, but the risk is that news media ‘hide’ behind high representation percentages, but actually still reflect

stereotypical or unequal representations of males and females. As De Swert and Hooghe (2010) state, it would be an easy solution to give more space to these ‘female’ topics, but that would not eliminate the gender segregation.

While researchers have explored the reasons behind gender inequality in the media in terms of the source’s functions and the topics they cover, less is known about how inequality is shown through the language. The limited research has found that the choice of verb assigns news value to the source and reflects the journalist’s attitude to the source statement and credibility (Bell, 1991; Caldas-Coulthard, 1994) and that females, unlike men, are attributed “irrationality, familial dependence, powerlessness and sexual and physical excess” (Fowler, 1991, p. 95). These studies examined the quotes attributed to these sources; however, the journalist also describes the source in critical ways leading up to (or following) such quotes, these are included in this study. Furthermore, by taking a multi-dimensional approach to

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measuring source equality, this study will broaden our understanding of the way male and female sources are mentioned, gendered, and otherwise described in the news. This will be done with a quantitative content analysis of news coverage from before and after the equality campaign. Thus, the central research question is: To what extent did Politiken’s source gender equality change after its campaign to eliminate source inequality?

Does representation matter?

This study is based on the concept of gender socialization, which John et al. (2017) define as a “process by which individuals develop, refine and learn to ‘do’ gender through internalizing gender norms and roles as they interact with key agents of socialization, such as their family, social networks and other social institutions” (p. 6). Thus, gender is a social construct that gets impacted by our surroundings.

We get most of our information about the world through media, both when we are kids and when we are adults (van Zoonen, 1994), which makes media an ‘extended arm’ of our social networks, helping us make meaning of our life and the world we live in (Kim, 2014). This gives the media, both entertainment and news, a huge responsibility since the media presents reality while (re)constructing it too (van Zoonen, 1994). Carey (1989) said that reality is produced by communication, though van Zoonen (1994)argues that it is moulded by “individual histories, beliefs and value systems” (p. 29). This means that it is the values we add from past experiences and references that creates our reality, making ‘the’ reality different from one person to another.

McQuail (2005) found that “the media can teach norms and values by way of

symbolic reward and punishment for different kinds of behaviour as represented in the media” (p. 292). Thus, media impact our understanding of gender and how people with a certain gender identity ‘should’ behave. Particularly in children’s fiction there is a raised awareness,

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with more TV shows, movies and books displaying a more equal representation, though titles and images still tend to highlight male characters and gender stereotypes are still heavily represented (Gooden & Gooden, 2001). Children are particularly receptive to gendered stereotypes when watching TV and reading books (Leaper & Friedman, 2007), but gender socialisation takes place throughout life. This means that representation can affect whether you see yourself being qualified to take a certain career path, how you are treated and how you are expected to behave in various contexts based on your gender (John et al., 2017).

While media effects often focus on entertainment media, news also influence our views on gender roles. News are especially tricky because they are viewed as representing the truth (Kim, 2014). There has yet to be established a direct relation between a journalist’s personal characteristics and their productions (Craft & Wanta, 2004). Though the journalists writes the articles, there are five levels that shape media content according to the hierarchy of influence (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016): the individual level, thus the journalists’ background and own socialisation, the institutional pressure at the organizational level, newsgathering routines (media routines level), the relationship with news sources in the extra-media level and finally the influence of ideological values. All of these levels can hold possible barriers that limits the access of female sources. Bell (1991) found that the way sources are depicted can have an impact on gender bias, which were supported by the research by Hansen, Littwitz and Sczesny (2016), who found that gender-inclusiveness in news resulted in the consumers to use more inclusive language and view the genders as more equal. In the following I will look into how females are represented and depicted in the news media.

Where are the women?

A robust body of research has established that there is inequality in the selection of sources by the news media. In 1995, Caldas-Coulthard found that only 14% of the sources in British

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newspapers were female. The study was replicated by Ripčíková in 2008, which showed a growth to 22%, though women made up a much bigger percentage of the workforce as well as the cultural and political landscape. Armstrong (2004) found that 33% of sources in American newspapers were women, and in Czech news media, Elmerot (2017) found five times as many male as females sources.

Since evidently the equality levels depend on the country of the publication, we should look at Denmark. The biggest international study on this topic, the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) carried out by Who Makes the News, conducts research in 114 countries every fifth year, including Denmark. Their most recent findings from 2015 showed that 25% of the sources used in news media in Denmark were women (Jørndrup & Bentsen, 2016). Though GMMP’s results are only based on one day, and therefore difficult to

generalize from, research by Andreassen (2015) found that source use by Danish outlets more or less reflected the GMMP results when investigating a bigger sample of TV news.

No study to my knowledge has researched the effects on a source inequality campaign, thus, this study wishes to expand the knowledge of how such a campaign can impact the source use in a big national and political newspaper such as Politiken. As mentioned, the Danish newspaper Politiken set out to better reflect the population and their own calculations showed a raise from 24% in 2014 to 40% female sources in 2017 (Skarhede, 2017). It is not clear how the result from 2014 was measured, but the 40% was based on a program created for the Danish journalist union (Berggren, 2019), which tracks the Danish news media’s online platforms with regard to source equality. The results from March-April 2018 showed that Politiken used fewer than 30% female sources those months (Berggren, 2019). However, these statistics track online news, thus, are not directly transferable to printed news. Since

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see a (big) increase of female sources in 2018. This leads me to my first sub-research question:

RQ1 To what extent did the relative proportion of female sources in Politiken’s coverage

increase after the source equality campaign.

Who gets a voice?

In the past decades, women have acquired more influence and make up a higher percentage across the workforce, in higher education and also hold high political positions (World Economic Forum, 2018). However, as we have just covered, the under-representation of women in news coverage has not changed much over time. Women are still heavily

underrepresented. Two sub-sections that are worth looking into are what kind of roles female sources are allowed to fill in the news, and also on which topics they get their voice heard. Let us look at them one at a time.

In her study of British newspapers, Caldas-Coulthard (1994) found that women were mainly quoted as speaking from their own experiences as private people, while men were quoted as professionals and authorities. Fowler’s findings (1991), also of British newspapers, shows that women tend to fill roles that lack power, such as in terms of their family relations and in their private sphere. In Denmark, Andreassen (2015) has examined Danish

broadcasters and GMMP has investigated all media types combined. Andreasen (2015) found that 44.8% of experience-based sources were female, whereas only 19.4% of experts were females. But where broadcasting often is recorded live in the evening, newspapers have the advantage of interviewing sources during their office hours. This could make newspaper interviews more compelling for a broader range of sources including female sources. The GMMP study found that 25% of the experience-based-sources used in Danish news outlets

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are women, and 32% of experts are women (Jørndrup & Bentsen, 2016), though the findings have to be interpreted cautiously. Notably, the media representation is still not as equal as the society. Fowler (1991) argued that the reason is that men have the powerful jobs and roles, but while this might have been true in the past (and still is in some countries) this argument seems flawed with 49% of the Danish workforce being female, 37% of the members Parliament being female and 41% of ministers being female (Dansk Statistik, 2019).

When women mainly are presented in the private sphere it constructs a reality where women are less knowledgeable than men and are less fit to powerful positions in society. This can impact in which jobs and positions men and women see themselves in and how they are being looked upon for instance by the people who are in charge of hiring and promoting. It can also impact the gender roles in the private sphere and can thereby actually impact the societal gender equality (van Zoonen, 1994).

Most, if not all, source-equality campaigns, such as Politiken’s, focus on the overall ratio of women to men in their source use. The issue is that newspapers can expand their use of experience-based sources, or simply replace the male experience sources with females, thus increasing the percentage of women, while still reflecting the same stigma to women. This makes source roles just as important to track as the overall ratios. This study will therefore cover both and also look into whether a source equality campaign affects which roles the female sources are given.

Based on previous research we can assume female sources primarily are being used as experience sources in Politiken. But, since Politiken actively attempted to eradicate

inequality, one would hope this also shines through the roles of the female sources after the campaign, with a move towards a higher percentage of female experts. Hence, I pose a second research question:

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RQ2 To what extent did the source equality campaign change the role attributed to female

sources, from experience to experts?

Similar to the disparity in roles females get to play in the news media, the topics they are mentioned in are also not the same as for male sources. According to van Zoonen (1994) female sources are overrepresented in articles about education, human interest, consumer and fashion – topics that will fall under the title “culture” in this study – and are very

underrepresented in all other topics. Topics like these are often referred to as ‘soft news’ or even ‘female topics’. De Swert and Hooghe (2010) also found that females were more likely to be featured in ‘female topics’ and Humprecht and Esser (2017) found that 75% of sources used for political news in 6 Western countries were males. In Denmark, the GMMP found that females make up 35% of all the news that can be regarded soft news and only 23% of the sources covering politics (Jørndrup & Bentsen, 2016). Thus, while females are not

overrepresented in any topic, they do appear underrepresented in political and other hard-news topics.

This shows, as Humprecht and Esser (2017) states, that “mass media continue to cultivate gender stereotypes” (p. 451), and it is clearly done by restricting which topics females get their voices heard in. Fowler (1991) stated that women were assigned to stories that lack power, though it can be debated which topics are ‘more powerful’. If we talk political power, Fowler’s statement might be true, but there is also a lot of power in culture subjects, and by ranking the topics we create a new bias, this can cause journalists or editors to dismiss crucial stories. Even within political coverage, Meeks (2012) found that female politicians receive much more gendered coverage than their male counterparts, meaning that the female politicians primarily got to talk about ‘female topics’. The fact that there is such a

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term as ‘male’ and ‘female’ topics illustrates the problem. These sub-topics are, however, outside of the scope of this thesis.

Thus, past research finds that female sources seems to mainly be represented in ‘soft news’. We should expect that in Politiken - a newspaper focusing on politics and culture - this disparity continues but is somewhat lessened by the campaign.

RQ3 To what extent did the source equality campaign affect the topics in female sources are

visible?

The power of verbs

The three categories mentioned above - visibility, roles, and topics - describe the quantitative representation of the genders in the news. As an additional way to expand upon previous research, however, I will also focus on how analysing the verbs connected to the sources can give us insight into how the genders are depicted. Lakoff’s (1975) seminal work established the study of ‘gender and language’, finding that language is used to keep women ‘in their place’ as polite and pleasing people. Though Lakoff’s method was problematically subjective, her theory has since been supported (Fowler, 1991; Tannen, 1990; van Zoonen, 1994). But where Lakoff did not specifically examine verbs, Mulac, Bradac and Mann (1985) found that women were described in ways indicating lack of certainty, and as more polite, whereas verbs used to describe men indicated action in fiction writing. Where the reader might be more aware of an author’s opinion and linguistic tricks in fiction, readers are more vulnerable when reading news because it is perceived as representing the truth (Kim, 2014). Fowler found the language of newspapers to be discriminating since women, unlike men, were attributed verbs depicting “irrationality, familial dependence, powerlessness and sexual and physical excess”

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(1991, p. 95). This is critical because researchers have found that language used in the media affects readers’ own language use and perception of the genders (Hansen et al., 2016).

Bell’s research (1991) analysed speech-verbs in the news. He defines speech-verbs as verbs that “describe the act of speech” (1991, p. 206) and even though his research was not focused on gender issues, his findings on the reflection power structures represented in media language are relevant. Bell found that speech-verbs both assigned news value and reflected the journalist’s attitude to the source’s credibility, thus guiding the reader to evaluate the statement and make the source appear legitimate or non-legitimate. This is supported by Machin and Mayr (2012), Caldas-Coulthard (1994) and by Ripčíková’s (2008) who all found that the verbs help the reader interpret the quote. Caldas-Coulthard (1994) created a

systematic breakdown of speech-verbs that showed the different functions and which verbs marks the journalist’s interpretation of the source (so-called metapropositional verbs). This framework has been adapted to categorize the verbs found in Politiken, since both

Ripčíková’s (2008) and Bell’s findings (1991) also showed that metapropositional verbs mainly are used with men and thereby reinforce men’s positions as more powerful.

What the past research on news is missing is that journalists do not only describe their sources when they are quoting them. Meeks (2012) and van Zoonen (2006) found that

females are subject to commentary on their appearance. It is also an issue to solely analyse the verbs in their linguistic categories, since there are different levels of reliability and authority in the different verbs within the same category such as explain and claim, both

metapropositional verbs, but with very different trustworthiness. Elmerot (2017) found that women were described more negatively in her content analysis of verbs in a Czech media corpus, using psychosociological distinctions to determine positive and negative verbs. This is outside of the scope of this study, though this study will look at all the verbs that are used to depict the sources and analyse both the categories and the frequency of the verbs themselves.

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In recent times, Berggren (2017), a data analyst, investigated the phenomenon in Swedish news and found that “men speak, explain, say, think, and statue. While women tell, describe, remember, feel, live, receive and sits”. These are very different images to draw of the genders. This leads me to the final research question:

RQ4 To what extent did the source equality campaign have an impact on the verbs associated

with female sources?

Sample and Method

This study is based on a quantitative content analysis of Politiken’s articles of two separate years. This method was chosen due to the aim of mapping out the use and depiction of

sources (Allen, 2017) and not attempting to explain why this is happening, thus, each variable is based on counts (David & Sutton, 2011). This is due to the belief that source equality is formed by equal frequency of use of the genders as well as an equal depiction of the genders.

Sample

The Danish newspaper Politiken was chosen because of their explicit awareness of their imbalance between male and female sources, thus making it possible to see the effect before and after such a campaign. Politiken has an online and a printed version; for this study, the print version was analysed since it is a curated version of what the editors believe the readers must know that particular day and are also perceived this way (de Waal, 2007). The printed newspaper should therefore reflect more afterthought than quick online news. Printed news also makes people read more and about a broader range of topics (de Waal, 2007), which might lead to a bigger impact.

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Since Politiken put source gender bias on the agenda in 2015, I selected four constructed weeks’ worth of articles from the year prior to that, 2014, as well as four

constructed weeks from 2018, when gender equality was intended to have been reached. The weeks were constructed by using a random number generator to choose a week number (1-52) for the Monday, then a week number for the Tuesday and so forth. This was done until four weeks were constructed for each year. However, specific days where gender issues were an explicit topic were excluded from contention. This included International Women’s Day and the surrounding week as well as week six, which in Denmark is a “sexual education week” in schools, which this often is reflected in the media coverage, with extra awareness of (and focus on) equality. This was also a control variable, though only two articles touched explicitly on inequality. Both were included in the analysis since they only made a brief comment about inequality in the position of the source. The articles were from 2014 and had two male sources and one female source each. By using four constructed weeks, we got a fair and non-skewed sample that is more likely to represent the ‘normal’ coverage than a single day or continuous weeks (Riffe, Aust, & Lacy, 1993), since a week or a month can be affected by external or internal events. Four weeks were chosen to give a reasonable sample size and strengthen the validity of the findings.

This analysis focuses solely on articles about Denmark in the first section of the newspaper (see appendix for detailed selection criteria), which covers politics and societal topics (Poltiken, 2015) and is known to display the most important news (UNF, 2018). This makes it fairly comparable to the gender equality levels in the Danish political and social landscape. This sums up to a sample size of 8 weeks, which translates to N484. The sample was drawn from Politiken’s online archive of the printed papers.

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Coding process

The codebook was developed based on previous research and focus on identifying the sources in each news article, the verbs associated with those sources, as well as the topic of each associated article and the role attributed to the source. Each variable is explained further below, and the full codebook is available in the appendix.

First, the topic of the article was coded. Due to the complexity of coding topics within news articles, however, I used a simple classification based on the topic assigned to the page header by the Politiken editorial desk in 2014: politics, economy and culture, which gives a simple, but useful overview of whether sources appear in the more masculine-gendered “hard news” topics of politics and economy, or in the more feminine-gendered “soft news” topic of culture (De Swert & Hooghe, 2010; van Zoonen, 1994). A more in-depth investigation of topics is beyond the scope of this thesis but should be covered by future research.

The unit of data collection was the source. Therefore, as the next step, all people mentioned in each article were registered, including people who were not quoted but who were simply mentioned in the articles. Sources are defined this way, not only to follow the process of Jørndrup and Bentsen (2016) in “Who Makes the News” studies, but also because all descriptions of people can affect the way we view gender. Thus, both quoted and

mentioned people have been named ‘sources’ in this study.

Next, the gender of each source was determined by the use of gendered names and gendered pronouns in the article. If a name was unclear, such as names that can be both male and female or foreign names, and no gendered pronouns were used or if the person explicitly was mentioned as identifying with female/male, the person was coded as ‘unclear/other’. 33 sources were registered as unclear (14 for 2014 and 19 for 2018) but no sources were stated as identifying as an ‘other’ gender.

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Each source was then classified according to her or his role, following a simplified version of Bell’s (1991) classifications. Sources presented as professionals were coded as one of three roles: ‘Politicians’ when presented as such in their professional role, ‘spokespersons’ speaking on behalf of a person or organization, and ‘experts’ which comprised of all other professionals speaking about or based of their field such a scientist speaking about their research or field and a firefighter that explains or comments on how to tackle a fire. ‘Ordinary’ people who were speaking from own experiences about their personal issues, experiences or opinions, thus their private sphere, were named ’experience’ since the connotations of ordinary can be somewhat inferior.

The final step was to code all verbs associated with the source. In this case, coding was done inductively, and all verbs associated with a source were listed in the dataset. The verbs were later analysed in two steps. Firstly, they were sorted into the extended version of Caldas-Coulthard’s (1994) table on ‘reporting verbs’ (see appendix), to see whether we find the same tendency of (metapropositional) verbs, which depicts the journalist’s opinion, primarily being used with male sources as Caldas-Coulthard’s (1994) and Ripčíková (2008) found. Secondly, the verbs were analysed by frequency and female-male ratio, making it possible to see which exact verbs were used with each gender per year. The verbs are analysed in their root-form, since the past, present and future tense of each verb were amalgamated.

10% of the sample (n = 49) was coded by a second, native Danish coder. The articles were randomly selected by a number generator. Using ReCal (Freelon, 2010) the calculated Scott’s π ranged from topic: π = .93 to gender: π = .98 and role: π = .99. For the verbs, it was not possible to do a Scott’s π test, because all words of the articles were not listed and then later classified as verbs or not; instead, the correct identification of each verb associated with each source were compared. Out of n = 770 verbs coded in the articles, only four were missed

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by the main coder and 14 were missed by the second coder; the rest of the verbs were the same and attributed to the same sources. The four verbs missed by the main coder were checked and then added before the analysis.

Findings

The first research question investigates whether Politiken’s equality campaign had an effect on the ratio of female to male sources over time. A Chi-square test showed that, surprisingly, there was no change in the percentage of female sources across the two periods. Specifically, whereas female sources comprised 31.2% of sources in 2014, they comprised 30.3% of sources in 2018 (2 _{= .122, df = 1, p = .73). Therefore, the equality campaign seems to have} had no demonstrable effect on the visibility of female sources in the first section of Politiken.

The second research question asked to what extent the equality campaign change the role attributed to female sources, from experience to experts. Politiken did not set any (public) goals for the sources-type the female sources should comprise, but to reach true equality, both genders must be shown in equivalent roles. A crosstabulation reveals that relatively more females are presented as experts, but when comparing with the males the female sources are primarily represented as experience sources, though the male sources are still dominant in every category. The results can be seen in Table 1.

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Two Chi-squared tests of independence were performed to examine the significance of the relationship between the gender and the role of the sources. The relation was significant both years, 2014: X 2 _{(3, N = 1075) = 38.847, p<.001; 2018: X}2 _{(3, N = 577) = 13.401, p}

<.005, showing that there is a disparity between male and female sources in terms of roles,

within both sample years.

As a next analytical step, I ran a logistic regression to see if the source’s gender (as female) could be predicted by the role and the year, independently or - as the focus of this question - in interaction. ‘Expert’, ‘Politician’ and ‘Spokesperson’ were comprised to ‘Professional’. The results can be seen in Table 2.

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Here, we see that whereas the professional role of a source consistently predicts that the source is male, there is no significant interaction between role and year in predicting the source to be female. In other words, females are no more likely to be expert sources in 2018 than they were in 2014. Thus, the quality campaign had no impact on the roles attributed.

The third research question explored whether female sources would primarily be found in articles covering culture, and whether that would change with the campaign.

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The crosstabulation shows that when comparing to the total amount of each topic, thus the ratio to men, women are mainly featured in articles about politics no matter the year, with culture as a close second, though the male sources are heavily dominating every category (Table 3). A Chi-squared test of independence was performed for each year separately to examine the significance of the relationship between the gender of the source and the topic of the article they are used in. The relation was only significant for 2014: X 2 _{(2, N = 1075) =}

22.125, p<.001. For 2018 the relationship was not significant: X 2 _{(2, N = 577) = 3.831, p}

>.10. This suggests that more equality has been achieved in topic representation over time,

though we need a logistic regression to establish this.

As noted, because politics and economy are regarded as ‘hard news’, compared to culture’s ‘soft news’ classification, I used this binary classification to predict source gender, by year, in a logistic regression. The test shows that the interaction between news topic and year is marginally significant at predicting that a source is female (p = 0.096). For ease of interpretation, the results are plotted in Figure 1.

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Consistent with the chi-square results, we see that female sources are more likely to appear in hard news topics in 2018 relative to 2014. Notably, they still comprise around 30% of the sources, but their relative visibility within hard news topics has increased over time.

The final research question asks whether the equality campaign had an impact on the way the sources are described. To compare male and female sources on the verbs associated with them, I calculated the relative proportions the verb-categories were associated with male and female sources respectively. Here, I had to manually account for the unequal appearance of female sources, thus, the verb-counts for females have been multiplied by 1.69 for 2014 and 1.7 for 2018.

Firstly, the verbs were placed in an extended version of Caldas-Coulthard’s table (see appendix). As evident in Table 4 the dispersion of verb-types is very equal across both genders and years, both genders are described as being active and with metapropositional verbs, which both Caldas-Coulthard (1994; 1995) and Ripčíková (2008) found mainly were used with male sources, to make them come across more powerful. From this the depiction the sources seem very equally described and no real change seem to have happened after the campaign.

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In order to see a more informative description of the verbs associated with male and female sources, I then calculated the ratio of use of individual verbs for females versus males, by dividing the number of times the verb was associated with female sources by those in which it was associated with male sources, after weighting the female use as noted above. To display (in a more informative way) how much more frequent the verbs associated with males were used, I divided the number of times the verb was associated with male sources by those in which it was associated with female sources, then timed by -1, to get male representation displaying opposite to female. Since both +1 and -1 is equal representation, we eliminate this confusion by setting equal representation to zero by subtracting one to the female ratios and adding one to the male ratios. Thus, a ratio of 0 means that the verb was equally associated with male and female sources. Positive means skewed towards females and negative towards males, thus, a value below 0 means the verb is X-1 amount of times more associated with

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males than females and values above 0 mean the verb is X+1 amount of times more

associated with females than males. Furthermore, only verbs used more than 10 times have been plotted here, to eliminates verbs that are used for a single article. For example, the verb ‘killed’ would be five times more likely for men because it is only occurring in a single murder trial article and this would be misleading.

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A N E Q U A L IT Y C A M P A IG N ’S E F F E CT O N F E M A L E R E P RE S E N T A T IO N 24

Figure 2 - Verb usage with females compared to males in Politiken's coverage 2014.

Note: To remind was used 24 times more for men than females. The graph is cut to be able to display the result on one page.

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A N E Q U A L IT Y C A M P A IG N ’S E F F E CT O N F E M A L E R E P RE S E N T A T IO N 25

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For both years ‘at sige’ (to say) is the most frequently used verb with both genders, with a total of 1459 occurrences in 2014 and 789 in 2018, it is followed by ‘at være’ (to be) and ‘at have’ (to have). Their number of occurrences are above the rest of the verbs by far.

As displayed in Figure 1, in 2014 the women ‘express, describe, think, tell, acknowledge, take and see’, where the men ‘remind, do, determine, continue, emphasize, enlighten and estimate’. Most verbs are primarily used for men (43 contra 8), which shows a greater variation in the language when describing male sources. ’Express’ is used 8.45 times as much for females than for men, where ’remind’ and ‘do’ are used respectively 24.26 and 10 times more for males than for females. This shows, that there is a clear difference in how the genders are described.

In 2018 the women ‘ask, sit, lay, speak, enlighten, wish, stand and think’, where the men especially ‘state, write, estimates, must, become, see, are able to and answer’ (see Figure 2). Still, most verbs are used primarily for men (27 contra 8). It is worth keeping in mind that the goal should be that all verbs are used close to equally as much for both genders, though true equality will be close to impossible to reach, unless you limit the language variation heavily, which is not desirable either. When words such as ‘ask’, ‘sit’ and ‘lay’ are primarily used for women it indicates uncertainty in the journalist’s belief in the persons abilities as well as a need to describe women’s physical statue. Evidently, the verbs used with the women are weaker and more descriptive of passive actions than with the men. Opposed to that, the verbs used with men shows will and confidence with verbs like ‘state’, ‘estimate’, ‘must’, ‘determine’, ‘emphasize’ and ‘do’ being especially associated with male sources, with the only exception of ‘writes’ which often is used when the interview was done via email.

If we look at the verbs used with professional people and experience-based sources, an even more problematic pattern emerges. The experience-based sources are depicted almost the same (weak) way, no matter gender. But the professional females are described differently

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than their male counterparts both years. In 2014 female professionals ‘express, think,

acknowledge and answer’ where the male professionals primarily ‘remind, come and do’. In 2018 the same pattern emerges with the female professionals ‘sit, ask and lay’and the male professionals primarily ‘state, write and estimate’ (graphs are in appendix). Although these are not absolute differences or hard-and-fast distinctions in terms of implied power or competence, nevertheless a difference emerges in the picture painted of male and female professionals.

It is worth noticing that almost all the verbs used for females in 2018 were used for males in 2014 (ask, sit, put, speak, state, wish, stand) and four of the eight verbs used to describe females in 2014 were mainly used for men in 2018 (explain, acknowledge, take, see). This shows that all words can and will be used for both genders, but also that men in general are described using a wider variety of verbs, thus showed as both trustworthy and strong as well as questionable or weak, where female sources primarily are described as passive and unsure. It is also worth noticing that ‘continues’ is so high on the list for the men, which indicates longer quotes since the verb is used to break up long quotes. This also shows that the journalist believes that (some) male sources have more valuable knowledge to add.

By examining the verbs used with the sources, we can establish that Politiken has not moved towards a more equal depiction of the genders, actually the findings almost point to the opposite. Especially problematic is when ‘professional’ females are described in as ‘weaker’ than their male counterparts.

Discussion

The objective of this thesis was to investigate how the Danish newspaper Politiken’s source equality campaign affected not only how many female sources Politiken use, but also how

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they are depicted. Past research has shown great inequality in source-use in the news media. This study explored how women are represented, in which topics they get their voices heard, whether they are used as a knowledge- or experience-based source and which verbs are used to describe them compared to their male counterparts.

Though Politiken launched an equality campaign and had three years to reach source equality, they did not manage to, despite their own claim of getting close. Actually, a lot of the measures in this study showed a worsened source equality in 2018 than four years prior. These findings are rather shocking, because this is the one thing that should be fixed by the campaign since it was the only specified goal. And while the present study does not look at

why equality was not reached, the fact that it was not shows a disengagement on an editorial

level as well as on the individual journalistic level.

A major goal of this study is to acknowledge that there are multiple layers of gender equality - beyond simple source visibility. Research shows that not only are women

underrepresented as news sources, they also tend to be assigned to topics and roles that lack power (Andreassen, 2015; Caldas-Coulthard, 1994; De Swert & Hooghe, 2010; van Zoonen, 1994). This bias is also reflected in this study, where females are mainly having their voices heard based on their experiences and not their knowledge. Interestingly, however, this bias is not reflected as strongly when it comes to topics; Danish women were actually mainly featured in articles about politics in my sample, perhaps reflecting the political landscape or the focus of the first section of Politiken. For source-role there is no significant change

recorded after the campaign, whereas for the topic there was a (marginally) significant change with females being slightly more likely to be represented in hard news in 2018. And though this study has found higher equality percentages of females than most of the mentioned literature, it is worth underlining that these percentages are overshadowed by the male

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dominance in all roles and topics. Females are only very close to reaching equality as experience-based sources.

As evident, it is also important to look beneath the percentages. Though high amounts of female sources are a step in the right direction, the way the genders are used and depicted plays an important role in how we perceive women’s capabilities. The socialisation effect of media coverage is exemplified beautifully by Hansen, Littwitz and Sczesny (2016), who found that when women were described as ‘heroines’ alongside male ‘heroes’ in news coverage, participants assumed that a higher percentage of people who performs heroic acts are women. This German study was based on ‘fill-in-the-gap-sentences’ in an experiment setting, where the participants first had read a report on heroes (or murderers) which contained either masculine or gender-inclusive forms. Though research has established that media has an effect on our view on gender (e.g. Bell, 1991; Prot et al., 2007), more research like this is needed to give us a deeper understanding.

The socialisation process is of course not solely the responsibility of the news media, but it plays a big role especially because news media is expected to present the truth and show what is important in our society (Kim, 2014). It is extremely problematic when the gender determines whether someone is more suitable to be a reliable source. We have to keep in mind that media has a role in constructing reality (McQuail, 1983; van Zoonen, 1994). This is important to be aware of as a journalist when making choices, drawing on both past

socialisation and the interaction with the source. The words used in news items guides the reader through a chaotic world and is less scrutinized than those used in fiction, since fiction often is discussed by readers, reviewers and researchers. The finding of this study should not be understood as a wish for restricting news language; on the contrary, a variety of verbs makes language come alive and adds an important layer to the reporting. Some quotes do need an evaluation by the journalist to be understood correctly, and some sources are

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justifiably described in a certain way. That said, my findings show clear differences in the gendering of female and male sources, with females generally attributed less power - through roles and verbs - than males. Shor et al. (2015) found that the amount female members of parliament and CEO’s are important predictors to explaining the equality of female sources. Given the equality within the ostensible expert source pool in Danish society, such equality can and should be eliminated.

This study is not without its limitations. The difference to Politiken’s own results of 40% might be that they were based on online news items, whereas this study focuses on the printed newspaper. Though, as evident in the statistic presented from March-April 2018 there was a drop to under 30% female sources, thus, there can be a big variety from week to week and day to day. This underlines the importance of a large sample. The difference between source equality in print and online news needs further investigation, especially since online news plays a big role in how most people consume news nowadays. This study also only analysed the first section of Politiken, future research could explore whether the patterns are different if the whole newspaper is analysed. Another limitation of this study is regarding the verb-analysis. Though this is a sample of 8 weeks coverage and 8,019 verbs, a much bigger sample would be useful here, especially when comparing two years, though this would

require much more time. This would give a more definitive insight to the gendered verb-usage in the media. Future research should also look into how the verbs are perceived by readers and could, by interviewing journalists and editors on the editorial methods used to reach source equality, give useful insight and possibly also reveal solutions. This would give even more validity to interpretations of findings like the ones presented in this study.

It remains unclear how well we can generalize outside the news outlet at hand.

Politiken is a top political daily in Denmark, which explicitly undertook an equality

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how they might make these results unique (and uniquely surprising). Future research should consider analysing multiple outlets with the same goal of gender equality, or even those who have not.

The solution to such inequality is not clear. Some researchers believe that the solution is to hire more female journalists, but as De Swert and Hooghe (2010) found, there was little-to-no connection between the gender of the journalist and their choice of source. Keeping the levels of hierarchy in mind (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016) editors can also affect an article by blocking it, editing it or requesting a different angle or sources.

This is not meant to dismiss the importance of gender equality in journalism as a field, but it hints at the fact that the problem is more complex, and more research is needed. Simply setting quantitative goals is clearly not sufficient, even on the quantitative measures, at least not in the way Politiken has carried out their campaign. And more importantly, journalists, editors and researchers have to recognize that 50% of sources being females does not equal gender equality. This paper has shown that even when taking the bias into account, the genders are still depicted very differently. Thus, future research (and source equality campaigns) needs to look at both the ratios and the depiction of the genders to get a more diverse picture of gender equality.

It seems we are stuck in a feedback loop where the audience subconsciously is made to believe men are more important and competent than women. This makes journalism dangerous, because it is happening without the awareness and intent of the journalists and editors. The Beijing Platform for Action even named media as one of 12 critical areas

standing in the way of gender equality (Gallagher, 2014). This is not about placing blame, it is about taking responsibility for change. van Zoonen (1994) found that “professional norms reaffirm a status quo” in the media (p. 57). It is time to break the status quo.

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Appendix

Detailed selection criteria for articles

For 2014, articles marked with the terms “Danmark” (Denmark), which includes articles on national politics and culture, and “Økonomi” (Economy) in section one were included. For 2018, international news and Danish news were mixed in the section, but only articles which focused on Denmark have been included: these also includes news on national politics, economy and culture. For both years, any special theme pages were excluded, since they are not comparable from year to year. Small notes, commentaries, analysis and op-eds were also not included.

Reporting verbs

Extended version of Caldas-Coulthard’s (1994) table:

Verb dispersion professionals

Figure 4 - Verb usage with female professionals compared to male professionals in Politiken's coverage 2014. Note: ‘To remind’ was used 22.92 times more for males than females and ‘to express’ was used 6.71 times more for female than for males. The axis was cut to be able to display the results in a readable size.

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Figure 5 - Verb usage with female professionals compared to male professionals in Politiken's coverage 2018

Verb dispersion experience

Figure 6 - Verb usage with female experience-based sources compared to male experience-based sources in Politiken's

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Figure 7 - Verb usage with female experience-based sources compared to male experience-based sources in Politiken's

coverage 2018.

Verbs translated

Verbs used over 10 times. Translation done using Gyldendal’s dictionary (Danish-English)

English translations (Root form) Danish Verbs (Root form)

To acknowledge At erkende To add At tilføje To admit At medgive To answer At svare To ask At spørge To be At være To be able to At kunne To become At blive To believe At tro To call At kalde To ring At ringe To come At komme To continue At fortsætte To describe At beskrive To determine At fastslå To do At gøre To drive At køre To eat At spise To emphasize At understrege To estimate At vurdere To experience At opleve To explain At forklare To tell At fortælle

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AN EQUALITY CAMPAIGN’S EFFECT ON FEMALE REPRESENTATION 39 To express At udtrykke To feel At føle To find At finde To get At få To have At have To have to At skulle To highlight At fremhæve To hope At håbe To live At bo

To make clear At slå fast

To must At må

To point out At påpege

To lay At lægge To put At sætte To refer At henvende To reject At afvise To remember At huske To remind At minde om To say At sige

To search for At efterlyse

To see At se To seek At søge To sit At sidde To smile At smile To speak At tale To stand At stå To enlighten At oplyse To state At udtale To suggest At foreslå To take At tage To think At mene To walk At gå To want At ville To warn At advare To wish At ønske To work At arbejde To write At skrive

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Table displaying Logistic Regression Analysis on topic

Codebook

CODEBOOK

An equality campaign’s effect on female representation

By Ida Munch

How the codebook and coding sheet works

Begin on a new column per article, but then expand as of V4 to as many columns as you have sources. Each row has a specified variable, which are all explained including examples on the following pages.

This is how the code-sheet looks:

The number in front of the options in the codebook, is the “code” you write in the coding sheet.

Orange words are highlighted to show where in the example you can see the specific code e.g. which words in the example show that the source is speaking from experience and not as an expert.

V1) Coder ID number

11 Ida Munch (main coder)

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V1a) Story identification number

Use the supplied ID number. _____________________

V2) Year of publication

01 2014 02 2018

V2a) Day and month of publication

_____________________

Found on the top left corner of each newspaper page (supplied to coder 12). Format: Day then month using two numbers. E.g. Fifth of January = 0501

V3) Topic of the article

Please read the whole article and evaluate which topic it covers. If more topics are present chose the one that is evident from reading the headline and sub-header.

01 Politics 02 Culture 03 Economy 05 other

- Politics covers all subjects that has a political impact. This includes articles

about policies on all levels of governance (local, national and supranational e.g. EU), and about politicians and government officials in their job function (not about their private lives). Politics is also coded for articles about environment, climate change and immigration.

Note: if a politician comments it is usually about politics.

Example 1: “Former ministers want to designate government officials”

The article is about how government officials are appointed and how some former ministers thinks they should have more say in the process. Thus, about politicians commenting on political processes.

Example 2: “Thulesen sharpens the tone in the blue bloc”

Thulesen is the leader of a Danish political party, and the article is about how the language has changed in the “blue” (right-wing) bloc, thus about

politicians in their job.

- Culture covers everything that has to do with how we live including health,

education, welfare, art, entertainment, media (incl. social media), travel, science, climate, crime and fame (including the royal family).

Note: All the above is coded as politics if they are mentioned in the context of politics or policies such as a new law about the health sector or the education system.

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Example 1: “The new president of the jury at Cannes is a star with sharp

opinions”

This article is about the new president of the Cannes festival, thus about the entertainment industry which is coded as culture.

Example 2: “Geert Wilders uses Danish domain for his Islam-critical website”

This article is about how Geert Wilders has been banned from Google, but a Danish domain is okay to host his beliefs. The article is not about his political life but the conflict with the domains, thus coded as culture.

Example 3 (Culture/Politics): “Early school-start can make Denmark the best

in the world”

This article is about the education system and experts suggesting changes, thus a culture piece. BUT if it was about how the politicians were implementing a new law or discussing changes to the education system, then it would go under politics.

- Economy all articles on the specified ‘Økonomi’ (economy) pages in 2014. For

2018 following criteria applies: topics covering economy, finance, insurance, stocks, tax and business (e.g. farming, production, industry).

Example 1: “Skat admits that the property valuations are flawed”

the article is about property tax, thus economy.

Example 2: “Economic optimism puts pressure on employees.”

the article is about unions fighting for higher wages in certain industries, thus about businesses and their economy.

- Other covers the ones that does not fit the categories above. V3a) Gender inequality

Does the article explicitly mention gender inequality? 00 No

01 Yes

Code ‘yes’ if the article mentions gender inequality regarding either genders. Male inequality is often found in topics such as maternity leave and reproductive/parental rights.

Example 1: Headline: “The new president of the jury at Cannes is a star with sharp opinions”

In article: “Blanchett is one of an only few female presidents in the history of the

jury

which shows a clear support to the Times Up Initiative for equality.”

- the headline might not reveal gender inequality, but the article mention that Blanchett is ‘one of only few female’ indicating an inequality in the position of presidency of the jury as well as the mentioning of the Times Up Initiative for

equality. Thus code 01 (‘yes’).

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Identify and list all people who have been mentioned (once per person). Only individual

people, not groups of people such as “the students” or organisation. List their first name and

position (include first letter of last name if multiple people have the same name) in each their column.

This also includes fictitious people used for examples or source protection. If a person is mentioned multiple times, they are only listed once.

Only exceptions: people mentioned within quotes (marked with quotation marks) and persons mentioned as anonymous and without gendered pronouns to tell the gender are not listed.

Example 1: “We are very happy with the result of the election,” says Lars Løkke.

Example 2: Later today the foreign minister will meet with the president of USA.

Example 3: “Everyone knows Mette Frederiksen will become the next prime

minister,” said Jens.

Note that Mette Frederiksen is not coded because she is mentioned in a quote. Only if he is mentioned another place in the article (which is not another quote), he should be coded.

V4a) Gender of sources

Each individual coded in V4 needs to be coded individually 01 Female

02 Male

03 unclear / other

The gender is determined by gendered pronouns and gendered names. A pronoun is a word that can stand by itself and refers either to the participants in the discourse or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse e.g. he/she/his/her. If a name is unclear, such as names that can be both genders (and the person is unknown to the Danish national coder) or only mentioned by their title* (e.g. CEO) and no pronouns are used OR if the person explicitly is mentioned as someone who does not identify with either gender, the person is coded as unclear/other.

* politicians mentioned by e.g. their minister title needs to be looked up if the coder is unaware of the gender of said person, since this should be obvious to the average news consumer of the country.

Example 1: Mette Larsen has made her hobby her business.

Example 2: Today, René Olsen is no longer a part of the National Parliament, but instead he is a board member of Novo Nordic.

Example 3: René Olsen have scored 100 goals as a part of the national men’s-team in handball.

- Orange = determiner.

- Green = uncertain gender. Since e.g. René can be both male and female in

Danish, we need to determine the gender by using the context such as gendered pronouns or other indicators like the ‘men’s-team’.