This EU-funded project brings together an IFJ-led consortium - which includes the University of Padova and COPEAM - to deliver a two-year programme aimed at developing journalists, media students and public broadcasters' skills on political reporting with a gender lens, thus contributing to build a gender-equal newsroom culture.
The first outcome of the action is a number of research projects carried out by students from the University of Padova and focusing the gender portrayal of politicians in the media. The complexity of the issue was highlighted by different perspectives, such as the coverage of transgender, the use of photo angles and social media feeds to create biased reporting, or the impact of Covid on gender depiction in the news. Some of them developed concrete tools like interactive maps or Instagram pages pointing out differences of treatment in the media between men and women in politics.
One of the main axes of the project is the implementation of training modulesintended to upskill journalists and journalism students.
Two train-the-trainers' sessions already took place in Cyprus and in Croatia, involving beneficiaries from all over Europe and providing future trainers with specific means to train their fellows. They are now in charge of conducting national training building upon the knowledge acquired and using the project's newly developed training modules kit.
The training modules are composed of five key components:
- understanding the qualitative and quantitative underrepresentation of female politicians in the media;
- exploring issues such as gender newsworthiness;
- conceiving a story through a gender lens and understanding the challenges facing women in positions of leadership where expectations are framed in exclusively masculine terms;
- exploring the power of language choice
- decoding multimodality and visual semiotics.
All these modules are tackled with an intersectionality angle to ensure all aspects of discrimination against women are taken into account.
A sixth component looks into training skills and tips to run the training.
The training toolkit is now available to the public! Download it here.
The training modules and all supporting research material are available on the AGEMI web site, a platform developed in the framework of an EU-funded project and intended to enhance gender equality in the media.
