Women and the press: why so few women read newspapers

Abstract

This study employs a two pronged approach in its attempt to discover newspaper attitudes to gender by addressing both the reading public and the internal policies of newspaper publications. To this end the study analyses how gender issues are addressed, their focus on women, and the type of assignments and rank accorded to women journalists. There have been significant political and social developments regarding gender issues in recent years, including measures to ensure parity and to combat domestic violence, along with a spectacular growth in the number of female university students and women entering professions that were previously regarded as a male preserve. At the same time, newspapers have been suffering financially and struggling to maintain their readership and this has led them to concentrate on the female sector of the market. As a result, a study of local newspapers was carried out to discover how much newspaper content was dedicated to gender issues; how often women feature as the main focus of news in articles and photographs; and how often women are used as a source of information; together with the number of newspaper articles written by women in different sections of the paper, while taking into account the fact that female readership varied considerably according to the different newspapers analysed.