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Who makes the news in 2025? What progress has been made towards gender equality in and through the m...
The global news media ecosystem has changed profoundly since the Beijing Platform for Action was adopted 30 years ago.
Technological advancements, shifts in audience behaviour, and evolving business models have driven change in how news are produced, disseminated, and consumed. Legacy media dominant in 1995 have ceded ground to digital forms, while professional production in media houses has no option but to compete with alternative and social media for audience attention.
Three decades ago, governments regulated the sector with some minimal international oversight, unlike the current considerably more complex regulatory environment. Data privacy laws, content moderation, and government reach are stricter. Audiences are transnational and international collaborations on content production are the norm, unlike three decades ago.
The evolution of women’s encounters with the sector across the period has not been as dramatic. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) reveals that in many ways, the status quo of gross underrepresentation and misrepresentation in content has persisted. (Figure 1)
The first global monitoring was sparked by a need for empirical evidence on women’s place, role, and participation in the news in comparison to men.
In the lead-up to Beijing, feminist media activists, scholars, and communicators meeting in Bangkok in 1994 resolved to organize one day at the start of 1995 for the monitoring of all media and to use the data as the basis for analysis of where women were and were not, a decision born from frustration with the widespread lack of respect for the dignity of women in the mainstream news media. Media monitoring was identified as one among several strategies with potential to democratize and decentralize media, as well as assist in promoting communication forms that could challenge the patriarchal nature of media. (Macharia, 2023)
The GMMP grew to become the largest and longest-running research and advocacy initiative for gender equality in and through the news media. In five-year spurts since 1995, the GMMP takes a snapshot of key gender equality dimensions in the news. Across thirty years to date, the GMMP has built the data from over 160 countries, with at least one observation for each variable and country. The year 2025 marks the 7th iteration of the research.
On May 6, 2025, we examined news disseminated on radio, television, newspapers, and news websites. Events dominating the news in 2025 up until then included (in Asia) the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Tibet, the impeachment of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yul and India’s Operation Sindoor in Pakistan; the Sudanese civil war (Africa); the war in Ukraine and elections in Germany (Europe); the war in Palestine (Middle East); elections in Australia (Pacific); and Donald Trump’s re-election, deportations and tariffs, and the Canadian elections (North America).
News agendas on the global monitoring day reflected shared global themes as well as distinct local concerns. Dominant narratives revolved around political instability, governance, economic struggles and election of a new Pope – the major story of the day covered across numerous countries particularly those with a large Roman Catholic population such as across Latin America.
“Politics & Government” was the main major topic analysed on the global monitoring day followed by “Social and Legal” news, “Economy” and “Crime and Violence”. (Figure 2) The sum of these four main major topics represents a little over three quarters (78%) of the news monitored.
Gender-based violence made the news to a small extent. In Australia, for example, multiple high-profile family violence cases were reported. Guatemalan news approached the violent deaths of two women – a psychologist and a TikToker – in different ways.
In other words, the global monitoring day was just another “ordinary” news day.
The historical findings indicate that after a slow and steady rise in women’s share of visibility and voice in the news, progress began flatlining in 2010, a trend that continues to date. There has been no real positive change during this period, nor has there been notable backsliding on a majority of the gender equality dimensions monitored by the GMMP.
Of the people seen, heard, or spoken about in print and broadcast news, only 26% are women. (Figure 3) This statistic represents a nine-point change in 30 years, with the latter half of this period contributing a mere two-point rise in women’s visibility and voice.
Women are marginally more likely to be featured in stories published online on websites dedicated to the news.
People from racial, ethnic, religious and other minority groups make up six out of every 100 persons seen, heard or spoken about across traditional and digital news worldwide. Of these, women are 38%. The likelihood that a woman in the news is likely to be from a minority group is less than one in 10.
North American news media are closest to parity, at four out of 10 subjects and sources being women. Asian and Middle Eastern media are at the tail end, with just 19% women of the persons seen, heard or spoken about in the news in both regions (Figure 4).
Women’s comparative presence in the core topics of politics and the economy rose 2 points and 1 point respectively between 2020 and 2025, 6 points in science and health stories – a “correction” of the 2020 Covid-era status when women had been displaced from prominence in this topic. In social and legal news, however, women’s share of subjects and sources declined 4 points. (Figure 5)
Overall, the sluggish pace of change between 2010 and 2025 suggests that some structural transformation in the dimensions measured by the GMMP has taken place but progress has reached an impasse. Under the current conditions, remarkable change towards gender equality is unlikely.
The impact of digitalization on the news industry and on gender relations online as a whole will make advancement in securing women’s rights in and through digital news more complex.
Various forms of gender-based violence (GBV) offline and online are featured in less than two out of every 100 news articles worldwide. Of these, less than 2% focus on gender-based violence against men. (Figure 6)
At the same time, GBV stories are more likely to make it to online news than to print, radio and TV news combined.
Gender-diverse persons are 0.4% of subjects and sources, appearing in newspapers and web-published stories on technology-facilitated GBV, sexual harassment/rape/sexual assault of women and other forms of gender violence such as feminicide. (Figure 7)
A little over 50% of persons in GBV news are men. The position or occupation of 16% of them (and 31% of women) is not stated. For those whose vocations are given, males are most likely to be criminals, legal professionals or law enforcement personnel (Figure 8), while females are celebrities, homemakers and children. (Figure 9)
Men dominate as reporters across the news. However, almost 3% of female journalists report GBV news, compared to just over 2% of male reporters. Gender-based violence is more likely to have visibility in the news if the reporter is a woman.
More than 50% of female journalists in GBV news cover sexual harassment, rape, sexual assault and intimate partner violence against women. (Figure 10) Just under one half of men report on other forms of gender violence including feminicide and trafficking of women and girls.
50% of the almost one in ten stories on technology-facilitated gender-based violence are reported by women.
38% of GBV articles refer to gender equality and/or human rights policy or legislation.
Only 13% clearly challenge gender stereotypes.
Evidence of the media’s recognition of women’s expertise, despite the strides they have made in the professions, is still lacking three decades post Beijing. Additionally, their proportion as people who the news are about has not changed in the past five years. Media representation of women as people in unremarkable roles, speaking only based only on popular opinion, has risen sharply, by nine points in 10 years. (Figure 11)
The Beijing Platform called for women’s equal access to media expression and decision-making. Three decades later, 41% of reporters in legacy news articles are women, an improvement from 1995’s 28% but still not equal.
Notable progress has been made in Latin America, North America and the Caribbean towards gender equality in the news reporter role in legacy news. (Figure 12) The proportion of female reporters has risen 14, 13 and 12 points respectively since the year 2000 when this indicator was included in the GMMP. The largest gender gap remains in Africa where less than three in 10 reporters on television, radio and in print news, is female.
The Internet’s importance for news delivery that peaked during the pandemic period continues today. Yet, while the proportion of female online reporters shot up from 25% in 2015 to 42% in 2020, it rose just one point in 2025 to 43%.
Currently, women are slightly overrepresented as online news reporters in North America, and almost at parity in the Pacific and the Caribbeans regions. (Figure 13) The most severe underrepresentation is in Africa where the proportion fell 4 points from 2020 to 2025. The gender gap in online news reporting widened in three regions – Africa (4-point decline), Latin America (-5 points) and the Middle East (-6 points).
Reporter gender difference in source selection has ranged between 5 to 6 points across the 30-year period, except in 2015 when it was only 3 points. (Figure 14) The gap was exceptionally wide during the Covid-19 pandemic news season. 2025 marks a return to a 5-point gap; 29% of those who appear, are heard, interviewed or discussed in stories by women journalists are women, compared to 24% in stories written by men. Women remain much more likely to be featured in stories by female reporters than in those by male journalists.
Gender stereotypes are the type of structural discrimination condemned in the Pact. Journalism that clearly challenges gender stereotypes is declining globally to levels never seen before in the GMMP monitoring. The 30-year findings suggest that news media remains a sticky barrier of inequality. Only two out of every 100 stories are likely to portray women and men in ways that debunk simplistic societal beliefs about their gender-based traits, roles, capabilities or behaviour.
The GMMP message in 2025, thirty years post-Beijing, is a global news industry whose progress towards gender equality has reached a crossroads. Proof of the successful implementation of the media recommendations in the Beijing blueprint is yet to be seen in the data. Strategic objectives J.1 (increase the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in and through the media and new technologies of communication) and J.2 (promote a balanced and non-stereotyped portrayal of women in the media) remain unfinished business.
Published on 4 September 2025. The full report from the GMMP 2025 with extended analyses, regional and country results will be published in November 2025. Please contact the GMMP team to receive the full report upon publication.
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