Skopje, 01.03.2018 – With the aim of drawing media’s attention to the importance of recognizing gender issues and being informed about them, and breaking gender stereotypes, the Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Media Services presented today the results of its research into gender in the television programmes in 2017, and launched the TV and radio spots against sexism in media.
The research on the portrayal of gender in the television programmes consisted of two analyses – one about gender issues in the programming concepts and contents of the daily information shows of the national TV stations, and the other about the way that women and men were depicted in the commercials.
The research findings show that the topics that could have been presented from a gender aspect were not recognized as such by the male and female journalists or the media outlets, while gender-related issues and topics have a low level of presence in the daily news editions. Men, holders of high offices, appeared in a larger number of news items within the daily news editions, most often as interlocutors, while the trend of using the masculine grammatical gender as universal when introducing the professions and offices, continued. In general, media were neutral when addressing topics related to gender, however, one could notice a partially positive trend in the media outlets where the number of female editors was larger.
As regards commercials, there is a certain visible balance in terms of the presence of male and female actors, whereas in terms of narration, male voices prevail in both the domestic and the foreign ads.
As part of the media campaign titled “Sexism humiliates”, two TV and one radio spot were launched with the aim of raising the awareness of the public and the media workers about the importance of gender equality and the overcoming of gender stereotypes and prejudices. Considering that this is a campaign of public interest, the Agency expects the media outlets to air the spots free of charge within their programmes.
The TV and Radio spots have been uploaded to the Agency’s YouTube channel. The same are available at the following links:
TV spot 1 – Sexism humiliates!