Gender Equality and the Media

A Challenge for Europe

Karen Ross, Claudia Padovani, Karen Ross, Claudia Padovani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138892682
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317484684
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection draws on and expands the findings from a pan-European research project undertaken during 2012-13 which was funded by the European Institute for Gender Equality and aimed to explore three key issues in relation to gender and media: women's inclusion in decision-making positions within media industries; how women are represented in the media; and what policies and mechanisms are in place to support women's career development and promote gender equality. The research looked at 99 major media organisations across the EU including public and private sector broadcasters (TV and radio) as well as a number of major newspaper groups. Researchers also monitored TV programmes (factual only but including entertainment genres) across one week and coded 1200 hours of TV. In addition to elaborating the results from 16 of the participating nations, the collection includes a set of context-setting essays and a summarizing conclusion as well as a reflection on the purpose and utility of gender indicators. It is the first major work to look across the European media landscape and explore both employment and representation, providing a unique glimpse into the contemporary media scene in relation to gender equality, including examples of good and less good practice.

Section IV
The National Case Studies

1 Austria

Working Conditions, Representation and Measures Towards Gender Equality

Susanne Kirchhoff and Dimitri Prandner

Introduction

The Austrian media system is marked by three specific distinctions. First, Austria was one of the last European countries to introduce commercial television and radio. Until the late 1990s and early 2000s, broadcasting was limited to the public service provider Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) (Magin and Stark 2014). To this day, the broadcasting sector is dominated by the ORF (Trappel 2004), whose various programs hold a market share of 37 percent (TV) and 74 percent (radio) respectively (ORF Mediaresearch 2014). Second, the newspaper market is dominated by the tabloid Kronen Zeitung, which reaches 32 percent of the Austrian population or 46 percent of all newspaper readers according to the Austrian Media Analyse, a continuous interview-based study of circulations and ratings (Media Analyse 2014). This hegemony has been somewhat broken in the field of online media, as the national quality newspaper Der Standard hosts the most successful Austrian news site www.derstandard.at, with an average of 3.8 million unique users per month in 2014 (Österreichische Webanalyse 2014). Finally, Austria has one of the most concentrated media markets in Europe (Magin and Stark 2014). The four biggest media companies are credited with up to 80 percent market share, are deeply involved with each other through cross-media ownership and are influential in many parts of the public sphere (Magin and Stark 2011). As in many other European countries, Austrian media constitute a highly competitive labour market: due to technological, economic and social changes, the number of jobs in the media and especially in journalism is decreasing, while the yearly number of graduates from institutions that offer a media- or journalism-oriented education is still high (Hummel and Kassel 2009). Thus, graduates are pushing into an over-saturated job market, and the majority of them are female (Dorer et al. 2009).

The Institutional Context: Media Governance and Women’s Networks

In 1979, Austria passed its first law on gender equality, meant specifically to ensure equal pay for men and women in the workplace. After several amendments over the years, the Bundesgesetz über die Gleichbehandlung [Federal Law for Equal Treatment] as it is called now, still has its main focus on equality in the workplace but has been extended to include issues like sexual harassment and gender neutral job advertisements. In addition, the efforts to ensure equality and anti-discrimination are no longer focused only on gender but also include sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, religion and ideological beliefs (Gleichstellungsgesetz [Law for Equal Treatment] 2015).¹ A second law, passed in the same year, required the establishment of a Gleichbehandlungskommission [Equal Opportunities Commission], which people can address in cases of discrimination, and a Gleichbehandlungsanwaltschaft [Equal Opportunities Attorney], who offers advice and support in dealings with the commission and in employment cases before court. Both institutions also give regular reports to Parliament (Bundesgesetz über die Gleichbehandlungskommission und die Gleichbehandlungsanwaltschaft [Federal Law Concerning the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Equal Opportunities Attorney] (2013).² However, the success of such efforts finds its limits in the structural context, e.g. the level of information about the actual rights and their enforcement, cultural stereotypes and role models, etc. (Czech and Salinger 2011). Despite these efforts, Austria is persistently ranked lower than its immediate German-speaking neighbours on issues regarding gender equality in employment (Hausmann et al. 2014). While Austrian women are more likely to have a university-level education than their male peers, they are also more likely to be paid less for the same work (ibid). These general findings are mirrored in the media industry as comprehensive studies on journalism show, including the research that informs this chapter (see also Kaltenbrunner et al. 2007; Hummel et al. 2012a).

Apart from the general legal frame, few Austrian media have their own instruments for gender equality. The exception is the public service broadcasting ORF, which is legally bound by the Bundesgesetz über den österreichischen Rundfunk [Federal Law Concerning the Austrian Broadcasting Services] to implement strategies for gender equality and did so for the first time in 2012 with the launch of its gender equality plan, Gleichstellungsplan, which will be discussed in detail later in the chapter. ORF’s gender equality plan has been praised as ‘good practice’ by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) in its 2013 report (Österreichischer Rundfunk 2013; EIGE 2013). It was also awarded the ‘Women’s Empowerment Principles CEO Leadership Award’ by the United Nations in 2015 (Österreichischer Rundfunk 2015).

In addition to the legal framework, the media governance in Austria also includes various instruments of self-regulation. Both the Presserat [Press Council] and Werberat [Advertising Standards Board] issue codes of ethics that include articles on gender discrimination (www.presserat.at and www.werberat.at). They also hear appeals by both members of the media and the general public in cases where the code has been violated. Yet their impact is limited by the fact that they cannot enforce sanctions. In addition, Austria’s largest print media – the daily tabloid Kronen Zeitung – is not a member of the Press Council and thus not bound by its code of ethics.

The journalists’ labour union³ also actively addresses gender inequality. The union has a specialist department that offers professional support and information regarding the situation of women in journalism as well as their legal rights. Female journalists find further support in informal and semi-formal networks, such as the regional Medienfrauen [Women in the Media], which aim to help women’s careers by building networks within the industry and are involved in the organisation of the Österreichischer Journalistinnenkongress [Austrian Female Journalists’ Congress].⁴ They include a number of women in high-ranking positions but are mostly concentrated in the capital Vienna and the region of Upper Austria, with a small pocket in Salzburg, and do not provide nationwide support. The networking group Frauen Arbeit Film [Women Work Film], which addresses a broad range of women working as e.g. directors, technicians, writers, actors in film and television, offers scheduled events to discuss working conditions and other issues concerning women in the film and television industries.⁵ In addition to these networks with a focus on a particular profession, the Frauennetzwerk Medien [Women’s Network Media] also aims to connect women and help them advance their careers in the media, and they are actively working to close the gender gap in the field (www.frauennetzwerk.at).

Research on Women in Austrian Media Industries

Austria has a tradition of developing research projects concerned with the situation of women in the media both, on a representational level and in terms of working conditions. The first study to take a systematic look at the involvement of women in television production and their presence on screen was Christine Leinfellner’s (1983) case study of the ORF, which is noteworthy insofar as it was sponsored by the Government’s Department for Social Administration. It painted a fairly dark picture of the representation of women in television, finding that the number of women neither on screen nor in the production process corresponded with the social reality of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, women were marginalised in the ORF by an extremely ‘traditional’ (male) culture (Leinfellner 1983).

Since that early study, a growing body of academic research has concerned itself with the representation of men and women in the media, of which only a few examples can be named here. A study carried out by Prenner (1995) followed a holistic approach to show the connections among media production, media representation and the structural context. Using the case example of Radio Burgenland, she showed how ORF’s organisational structure, the editorial goals of a political news magazine and the work processes in the newsroom produced an environment in which there were few female journalists working in political news. A decade later, a different study looked at the depiction of men in TV films, series and advertisement (Ponocny-Seliger and Ponocny 2006). In addition, the ORF media research department has also on occasion collected data, e.g. by commissioning a study on gender roles in ORF fictional programs, which showed that alternative gender roles were present on screen but tied to single characters or episodes and not spread throughout the whole of a series (Klaus and Kassel 2007). Lastly, Austria participated in the Global Media Monitoring Project in 2005, 2010 and 2015, a global comparative initiative that provides worldwide data on the representation of women in all types of media on a single news day.⁶ In sum, however, research on the representation of women in print media and broadcasting is mostly based on individual case studies as there is no consistent media monitoring, either by a public institution, an independent trust or the media industry itself.

Until the 2000s, the situation was much the same for research regarding the position of women within the cultural and media industries as media professionals.⁷ The only continuous data collection was and is focused solely on media consumption. The Media Analyse report releases information on circulation figures for print media four times a year, including data on gender, but the latter is not publicly available (www.media-analyse.at).⁸ However, in the last 15 years, several nationwide research projects that were primarily concerned with the situation of the journalistic profession at large also collected data on female journalists, if not on other professions in media production.

The first of these studies was based on a secondary analysis of already existing material: Johanna Dorer (2002) relied on surveys about journalists done by different researchers at the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg as well as publicly available organisational data from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Likewise, Roman Hummel and Susanne Kassel (2009) used the membership files of the journalists’ union for their longitudinal analysis of the socio-demographic development of the journalistic profession. The union has collected information about its members since the late 1940s, but the sex of the journalists has only been explicitly shown since the early 1980s. Therefore, no reliable data about women in journalism before the 1980s exists, at least not on a large scale.

For these last 35 years, Dorer as well as Hummel and Kassel show that the Austrian media landscape has slowly accommodated more female journalists: their number has risen constantly from around 16 percent at the beginning of the 1980s to around 30 percent by the end of the 1990s and somewhere close to 40 percent by 2008 (Dorer 2002; Kaltenbrunner et al. 2007; Hummel and Kassel 2009). Since at least the 1980s, women in journalism have routinely had higher levels of formal education than their male peers and are more likely to have studied media-related subjects at university, yet they have faced both a pay gap and a glass ceiling (Dorer 2002; Hummel and Kassel 2009). However, another gender gap is closing: almost as many men as women now work as freelancers but only because precarious job conditions are on the rise for both sexes due to the structural changes and economic crisis in the media sector (Hummel and Kassel 2009).

Many of the findings of the secondary analysis by Dorer and Hummel and Kassel have been confirmed by other studies that gathered original data on gender differences. The study Der Journalisten-Report by the Medienhaus Wien (Kaltenbrunner et al. 2007) and the Medienkarrieren im Umbruch project from the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Salzburg (Hummel et al. 2010) both took a comprehensive look at the actors associated with the field, and those projects led to several specialised follow-up projects, including one focused on the professional relations between politicians and journalists (Kaltenbrunner et al. 2010) and another on the situation of regional journalists (Hummel et. al 2013). In addition, the chapter on female journalists from the Journalistenreport 1 has always been available for free online,⁹ and its accessibility helped to make the struggles of women in the media industry and journalism visible in the debate about the state of the journalistic profession.

These large-scale studies provide comprehensive socio-demographic data on journalists of both sexes. They estimate the percentage of female journalists to be between 37 and 42 percent, the difference in numbers being accounted for by the different modes of data collection (Kaltenbrunner et al. 2007; Hummel et al. 2010). In any case, the percentage of female journalists is now at about the same level of both Germany (37 percent) and Switzerland (33 percent), although below that of Austria’s neighbours to the southeast (Croatia: 45 percent; Serbia: 50 percent; Slovakia: 57 percent) (Kaltenbrunner at al. 2007: 115). Kaltenbrunner et al. (2007) argue that the number of female journalists has been on the rise since 2000, while also stating that women are, on average, four years younger than their male colleagues. They also showed that only 68 percent of women in journalism were employed full time as opposed to 82 percent of the men (ibid).

Most of the findings highlighted by Kaltenbrunner et al. (2007) are matched by those seen in two research projects conducted at the University of Salzburg in 2010 and 2012. Beyond those similarities, other work demonstrates that women journalists are more likely to work at the fringes of the journalistic profession in local newspapers and specialised media outlets (Hummel et al. 2012b; Kirchhoff et al. 2013; Prandner 2013). They are also more content with their situation than their male colleagues despite their well-documented disadvantages in pay and career options (Hummel et al. 2012a). Indeed, one study found a severe gap between men and women in management positions, as the mean of the respective men is in the €4000+ before tax income bracket, and women are mostly in the €3001 to €4000 bracket (Hummel et al. 2010, 2016). In addition, only approximately 24 percent of managers are women (Hummel et al. 2010, 2012a; Kaltenbrunner et al. 2007: 115).

In addition to these studies, several projects on women in the media industry exist outside academia. Perhaps the most important can be found in the conference proceedings of the annual Österreichischer Journalistinnenkongress [Austrian Female Journalists’ Congress], which are published online and address a wide range of topics such as the glass ceiling, networking and career strategies, journalism education for women...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Section I Introduction
• Section II Research and Policy Review
• Section III The WIME Study: Context, Methods and Summaries
• Section IV The National Case Studies
• Section V Conclusions
• Appendices
• List of Contributors
• Index