Gender and the Media: Investigating audience opinions on TV, radio and the Internet

In this paper the authors explain how they investigated the issue of gender and the media in the UK, looking at how the audience feels about both the amount of coverage of men and women and their views on the quality and character of portrayal on TV, radio and online. As well as exploring the methodological challenges in researching the subject, they also discuss how they used the Bem Sex Role Inventory to explore whether where the audience sits on a spectrum of masculinity/femininity helps to explain their consumption and appreciation of the television they consume.