The EqualVoice Mindset: How to make every voice heard

Authors

Dr Annabella Bassler has been the CFO of Ringier AG since 2012 and has undergone various stages in the finance sector since 2007. In addition to her responsibility for Ringier’s activities in Romania, she drove the digital transformation of the group and initiated the EqualVoice initiative to promote the equality of women and men in media coverage. Bassler completed her business studies at the European Business School and previously worked in various finance positions at Hamburg Süd, the shipping company of the Oetker Group in Hamburg.

Stefan Mair is a journalist and podcast host. He completed his training at the ­Axel-­Springer-Akademie in Berlin and studied journalism in Vienna and Istanbul. He reported as a freelance correspondent for the Italian broadcaster RAI. Mair has been working for several years as the Head of Department for the Handelszeitung in Zurich, and since 2022 also as a weekly editor. He is the moderator of the start-up podcast Upbeat. He supports newsrooms in several countries in ­implementing EqualVoice in their editorial routine.

Imprint

EqualVoice / Ringier

© 2024 Ringier AG, Zurich

All rights reserved

Infographics: Andrea Klaiber, Anne Seeger

Design and layout: Frau Federer GmbH

AI image concept: Julie Body

Photos: Ringier (p. 26), Moritz Schmid (p. 38), Axel Springer / Matti Hillig (p. 74), Novartis (p. 88), Harvard University (p. 120), ZVG (p. 60, 136)

Hand lettering: Zuni Halpern

The illustrations in this book (p. 24, 34, 45, 58, 66, 72, 86, 100, 104, 133, and 144) were generated by the AI model Midjourney and refined by a human.

Inhalt

Listening to every voice

The gender visibility gap

A male view of the world

Is the gender visibility gap a problem?

Can the gender visibility gap be changed?

The gender visibility gap in figures

Should the gender visibility gap be changed?

Flashback to 2019: So, are we counting women now?

Jump to today: Productive unrest in the newsroom

Annabella Bassler: I soon realized: Our USP is the integration with artificial intelligence.

Measuring the gender visibility gap

What is the EqualVoice-Factor?

What do we want to measure?

The BBC case: Disillusionment in London

Constructing the instrument

Diverse and co.: What is technically feasible?

Test rounds at Blick

A KPI under live journalism conditions

Katia Murmann Amirhosseini: Many would claim that we don’t even have a problem.

Integration, criticism, and crisis

Integration into editorial workflows

Criticism of EqualVoice

Counterarguments

Working in the pandemic: Who still needs EqualVoice?

The EqualVoice toolbox

Tools for editorial everyday life

Expert list

Publication review

Cross-editorial meetings

Coaching

Search Guide

Specifically responding to fluctuations in the gender visibility gap

Merlin Bauer: It helps when editorial teams and data teams intertwine.

EqualVoice in videos and images

The gender visibility gap in video and TV

The EqualVoice score for moving images

Analysis of images

The (absence of) women in photo databases

The visual representation of women in media

Questions for image editors

Decisive are also those who decide

Diversity in AI-generated images

Miriam Krekel: One must critically examine the portrayal of women. Not only in tabloid journalism.

On the path to a new newsroom culture

Dimensions of diversity

Diverse careers

Diverse meeting culture

Diverse representation

Walk the talk – internally as well

Is this EqualVoice?

EqualFrame: What do we ask?

How did you manage that?

The Million-Franc Question: What to do with sex advertisements?

Sexist advertising

Marie-France Tschudin: It almost inevitably raises the question of how I got this far.

Learnings for twelve departments

Tips for every newsroom

Economic journalism

Political journalism

Guide journalism

People journalism

Investigative journalism

Entertainment and lifestyle journalism in women’s magazines

Tabloid journalism

Sports journalism

Data journalism

Children’s and teenage journalism

Cultural journalism

Internal communication

Iris Bohnet: Role models show that something is possible.

An international movement

A scale-up project

The EqualVoice Summit

Expansion with Axel Springer

Roll-out in Eastern Europe

Journalistic debates in Poland

EqualVoice in business

EqualVoice United emerges

Lea Eberle: New demands in the field of gender equality will continue to emerge.

A liberal approach to ­modern journalism

Moving out of the niche

Transparency makes vulnerable

Liberal and data-driven

Without quotas

Without target specifications

Without threatening scenarios

Without taste police

Without audience protest

EqualVoice in retrospect

EqualVoice in 50 years

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Literature and recommended reading

Listening to every voice

When on November 10, 2019, at 7:30 am in meeting room 1 of the Ringier Press House in Zurich, the EqualVoice initiative was introduced, no one could have foreseen the sea-change that followed.

Just four years later, 32 newsrooms across Europe are employing EqualVoice technology. 50 million people receive their information from newsrooms where the EqualVoice software is integrated – an AI tool that assists media in measuring the representation of women in their articles and visual content. This artificial intelligence (AI) analyzes thousands of articles daily and even hundreds of thousands monthly, providing editorial teams with insights and evaluations regarding the proportion of women in their reporting. It also signals when women are disappearing from coverage.

All of this would have been scarcely expected on that bitterly cold November day, even with considerable optimism. This is partly because the discussion on that morning was intense and controversial: What is EqualVoice, really? A PR campaign by Ringier? A new idea in journalism? Yet another data tool dissecting journalism? Isn’t editorial work already too driven by numbers? The debates in the newsrooms remained intense and contentious even after the introduction of the EqualVoice software and its associated tools. This book provides insights into these discussions for the first time.

The goal of EqualVoice has remained the same from day one: to increase the visibility of women in media and to promote journalistic debate on diversity. After all, only those who are visible are perceived by media audiences. Only those who speak and are heard can play a role in public discourse. And the gender visibility gap, meaning the unequal visibility of women and men in media, results in many voices, solutions, and contributions to debates going unheard.

Today, EqualVoice is the most successful initiative for promoting the visibility of women in European media. This book describes how the gender visibility gap can be addressed with a data- and technology-driven solution – without imposing mandates, with a liberal approach. Furthermore, it aims to share learnings for other initiatives and diversity programs in companies.

Much of what has happened in recent years at media companies working with EqualVoice is of interest to the entire industry. Some companies can avoid detours and obstacles by considering the learnings from this book, from top management down to individual department levels, from sports to politics, from people to economics. Additionally, a compact tool for everyday editorial work is provided through the analysis of ten editorial roles, which is included with the book in the form of a detachable booklet.

This book aims to demonstrate how a generation of journalists, both within and beyond Ringier, who debate and treat equality and diversity as journalistic dimensions, can change the media industry. It draws on experiences, learnings, best practices, and a chorus of inspiring voices at journalism’s front line, driving momentum for positive change.

The gender visibility gap

Women are significantly less visible and audible in the media than men. This imbalance, known as the gender visibility gap, shapes public debates.

A male view of the world

Men and women are equal in Switzerland. However, their visibility is unequal. Gender equality has been enshrined in the Swiss Federal Constitution since 1981. However, in 2023, this equality has not been achieved in the media and public sphere. Media still predominantly represent men. In newspapers, online media, television, and radio, men receive more space and airtime. And it’s significant.

In Switzerland, media reports are about 77 percent about men. For every mention of a woman, there are about three mentions of men, as the Research Center on Public Opinion and Society (fög) at the University of Zurich found in a study. This inequality exists, with minor differences, in all Swiss language regions and across all types of media, according to fög, which examined the period from 2015 to 2021.

When examining individual sections, the numbers are alarming: Women constitute 40 percent of athletes in sports but are mentioned only in a fraction of articles on the subject. Women also play a minor role in economic reporting, with over 80 percent of the actors being men.

Underrepresentation is also evident in Germany and Austria: A study by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) showed that women are clearly less visible: An analysis of around 3,500 political news contributions from twelve Austrian daily newspapers, TV, radio, and online media in 2018 revealed that only 25 percent of the contributions featured women as central actors, such as experts, politicians, or private individuals expressing their opinions or assessments. In the vast majority of articles, namely 75 percent, no female actors appeared at all. This means that on average, each article featured only 0.29 women compared to 1.15 men. Similar figures exist for Germany: According to a study by the MaLisa Foundation (2020), 74 percent of experts in informational programs are male, and 26 percent are female. Other studies counted female experts in German evening news and showed that their share was only 21 percent.

According to the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), men account for 82 percent of media coverage worldwide. In 2015, the GMMP conducted the largest study on the portrayal, participation, and representation of women in news media, spanning 20 years and 114 countries, and found that less than a quarter of news sources are women. When women are featured in the news, they are more likely to report on their personal experiences or serve as eyewitnesses.

A study by the European Journalism Observatory examined the representation of women in political reporting in 13 countries. Women were quoted in only 23 percent of the reports; in the rest of the articles, men spoke and expressed opinions on pressing political issues or were described in contributions.

Data from UN Women also show that globally, women are only actors or interviewees in 22 percent of news coverage. In another analysis of 35,000 American news articles, it was found that men are quoted three times as often as women.

Anyone who consumes media, regardless of the type, thus gets a predominantly male view of the world, commented on by men. The gender visibility gap means that for a girl born today, about 25 percent of media space is reserved, while for a boy, it’s about 75 percent.

The aim should be to consider diversity in a much broader sense, extending well beyond gender categories.

Ladina Heimgartner, CEO Ringier Media Switzerland

Is the gender visibility gap a problem?

The gender visibility gap has not played a significant role in public discourse thus far. Often, these figures are acknowledged with a shrug. Many people simply accept – there must be valid reasons why a man has a much higher chance of bringing his ideas and issues into the public sphere than a woman. The argument goes that since there are fewer women in certain positions, the inequality is justified. Media reflects what exists, and women are simply less common in leadership positions. But is that true?

The proportion of women in leadership positions in business is increasing. The number of female members of the National Council in Switzerland is at an all-time high. Women should have an equal voice, yet it is significantly under represented, even in areas where the percentage of women is considerably higher than their media representation. The gender visibility gap seems to be stuck and not responding to the increasing presence of women in public offices and leadership roles. This is partly due to routines in editorial work. When seeking expertise, men are usually approached (more on this on page 51). They comment and interpret much more frequently than women, thus shaping public discourse on a global scale. This is evidenced by data from several large-scale and international studies. Those who consume media are presented with a worldview shaped by the male perspective.

Even in the examination of major news events, the data clearly shows which gender dominates the reporting. An example is the Covid-19 pandemic. Men dominated the headlines, they commented on the pandemic, described the problem, and offered solutions. Their thoughts and opinions were widely amplified. In contrast, women were massively underrepresented. An analysis of 146,800 articles on the pandemic in 15 major media outlets in the USA, UK, and Australia showed that only one-third of opinions on the pandemic came from women. When it came to issues related to epidemiology and healthcare, the numbers were even lower: here, only a quarter of the quotes were from women. However, women were more frequently consulted when it came to the impact of the pandemic on childcare. In reports from the financial and economic press on the topic, only one in six voices was female.

Should it be simply tolerated that in major societal problems and challenges, primarily men provide assessments and solutions that are also perceived by the public? Should the stagnation of the gender visibility gap in the media be accepted, despite the increasing number of women in leadership positions, for example? How can newsrooms respond to these societal changes without distorting reality in their work?

"Role models serve as inspiration, but for women to become role models themselves, they must