Women in Media Industries in Europe: What's Wrong with this Picture?

Over the past 40 years or so, the large volume of work on gender and media has mostly focused on women’s representation and there is a complementary and growing literature which considers women’s employment in media, mostly news, industries. However, there is very little work which has explored the extent to which women have achieved the top jobs in the sector. When the Presidency of the Council of Europe moved to Ireland in January 2012, they chose to focus on Area J of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA, women and media) and worked with the European Institute for Gender Equality in scoping out a set of research projects to be commissioned. This short paper draws from one of those studies which aimed to explore the extent to which women are employed in decision-making positions in large-scale media organisations across Europe, including on boards and what kinds of gender-equality and/or women-focused policies are in place in those organisations. Once the resulting data had been analysed, the project intended to develop a set of indicators which could be adopted by the Council of the European Union – see later.