Gender Differentiation in Media Industries. Man-made media? Muted Women

The paper addresses the problem of why news content is dominated by what men consider to be newsworthy (Melki and Mallat, 2013). It builds on research showing how women are stereotyped, rendered invisible, or excluded in the media (e.g. Ponterotto, 2014; Fawcett Society, 2015). This has become an increasingly relevant subject area, especially following the Beijing Platform for Action launched in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women. Governments then agreed to 'support research into all aspects of women and the media so as to define areas needing attention and action and review existing media policies with a view to integrating a gender perspective', a message reaffirmed in the 2015 twenty-year review (UN Women 2015). Research both on letters to the editor and on women's participation in such letter-writing is generally lacking and the paper shows who actively engages with the media, how and why. The unique value of this data is that, unlike most public online contributors, the writers to hard-copy letters to the editor are not anonymous: their names (revealing therefore their gender), (worldwide) locations and (usually) their affiliations and qualifications (or claims to expertise) are published alongside their letters. The question raised is: why do women participate so little in this activity? Our study focuses on newspaper letter pages to the editor, with the example of the influential and international Financial Times (FT). Within the theoretical frameworks of occupational gender segregation and intersectionality, the paper represents a critical discourse analysis of letters published in the FT over the past three years (2015, 2016 and 2017). Drawing on this analysis and interviews with a letters page editor and prolific writers of published letters, the study investigates the gendered distribution and content of the different subject matters and the language used. Analysis of the collected quantitative data is currently on-going, with the interviews to follow. The FT Letters pages reveal those subject areas that are of interest to women and how they approach them. Initial findings indicate a very low proportion of women writers writing on most of the same themes as those addressed by a larger field of men. The paper will present relevance to contemporary debate, the length of letters, position on the page etc.