05 Sep GMMP 2025 Urges Bold New Strategy for Media Gender Equality, 30 Years After Beijing
Three decades after governments pledged transformative change for women through the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, progress towards gender equality in and through the world news media continues to flatline, according to newly released findings from WACC’s 2025 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP).
The Highlights of Findings report from the 7th edition of the GMMP issues an urgent call for a radical reset of strategies by all in the news ecosystem to advance gender equality post-Beijing+30.
The report was launched yesterday at an online event co-hosted by WACC, GMMP partner UN Women, and the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA).
Progress on a plateau
“The movement towards a 50–50 representation of women and men in the news has plateaued,” GMMP Global Coordinator Rodrigo Molina reported to the more than 200 participants at the online briefing.
For GMMP 2025, teams of monitors in more than 90 countries across eight global regions collected data from approximately 30,000 news items on 6 May. Media monitored included print, TV, radio, and internet news.
The findings show that just a quarter of those who are seen or heard in the news are women, despite them making up half of the global population.
This statistic has barely changed in the last 15 years, Molina said, with a mere one-point increase since the last GMMP in 2020 and only a nine-point increase in the 30 years the GMMP has been taking the gender pulse of news media worldwide.
“The low visibility of women in news media does not reflect today’s global reality that women are involved in contributing to society in so many ways,” Molina concluded.
Who makes the news – Part I
In the nearly 30,000 stories monitored in 2025, four topics dominated: politics and government, social and legal issues, the economy, and crime and violence.
The GMMP found that women were most present in stories on topics other than these four, ones that made up a minority of the news sampled, like science and health; celebrities, arts, and media; and gender-based violence (GBV).
GBV was studied as a separate indicator for the first time in this 7th edition of monitoring, the GMMP global coordinator said – with the appalling finding that, despite the prominence of GBV in the lives of women and girls, 50% of the population, it makes the news in less than two out of 100 articles worldwide.
When it comes to women’s participation as sources in print, TV, and radio news, “women tend to express popular opinion or personal experience,” Molina observed. They are the subject of a story or feature as a spokesperson or expert commentator in less than one out of four stories.
The GMMP global coordinator noted that progress in the representation of women in print, TV, and radio varies from region to region. Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Pacific each registered an 11–13 point increase since the inaugural GMMP in 1995, while Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa marked single-digit advances (5%, 3%, and 1%, respectively), and the Middle East showed a decrease of 5%.
Who makes the news – Part II
The 2025 key findings show that strides continue to be made towards gender parity in the news reporter role. “The presence of women as reporters tends to be on the 40% mark or above” in print, TV, and radio, and levels in internet news are slightly higher, Molina noted.
The 7th edition also confirmed the historical pattern that women reporters are much more likely to select female news subjects than their male counterparts. This is especially important because stories by women journalists are consistently more likely to include women subjects (29%) than stories by men (24%), underlining the importance of parity in newsroom staffing as a pathway to more equal representation.
GMMP as vital accountability tool on Beijing commitments
The launch of the GMMP 2025 key findings comes at a landmark moment as the world is marking 30 years since governments committed in the 1995 Beijing Platform to take action for gender equality, event moderator Francesca Donner, founder and editor of The Persistent, said.
The commitments of the global equality roadmap included women and the media. As outlined in Section J, UN Member States pledged to advance equal participation of women in and through the media and to eliminate gender stereotypes in the portrayal of women and men in the media.
Since then, the GMMP has provided the world with a “unique and vital accountability tool,” the moderator said. The data from the GMMP on who makes the news and who doesn’t, is “everything,” making “concrete” the challenge of gender equality in and through the media.
The United Nations General Assembly opening next Tuesday will examine progress on the Beijing Platform and launch a new Beijing Action Agenda, according to Kalliopi Mingeirou, chief of the Ending Violence against Women and Girls Section at UN Women.
She pointed to the GMMP 2025 key findings as a “wake-up call and a roadmap” for action, flagging where “progress has stalled and renewed effort is needed.”
That only one in four people seen and read about in the news is a woman reveals a “gap in democracy,” Mingeirou declared.
“Media is one of most powerful forces shaping public discourse, democracy, and accountability. When women are absent, democracy is incomplete and public discourse distorted. Without women’s voices, there is no full story, no fair democracy, and no shared future.”
Real-world perspectives on GMMP 2025 findings
Journalist Stephanie Fillion from the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA) highlighted a few of the many systemic challenges that she and her colleagues face today – including the fast pace of reporting and ever-evolving business models to ensure financial survival.
At the same time, she said the monitoring report makes clear that “as journalists, we have to do better” when it comes to gender equality. She sees the data from the GMMP research as an important tool for the media industry to develop initiatives that advance the Beijing Agenda and ensure that women’s voices are heard in and through the media.
Digital media give women a new way to make their voices heard without needing to wait for traditional media to offer a platform, said Zhakline Lektari, a journalist and digital influencer in Albania.
This brings risks as well, exposing women to violence at a much higher rate than men, she cautioned. “Many women stop speaking because of this and choose not to be visible in public, in digital areas.”
Lektari flagged the lack of regulatory systems to protect women and to hold platforms accountable. The aim should be not only to open these spaces for women but also to ensure they are “safe for women’s voices.”
When it comes to advancing gender equality in and through the media, civil society must be more innovative and agile, stressed Sylvia Obaga, regional communications manager for Africa and the Middle at Equality Now.
This means not only working with legacy media but also digital influencers. Fostering collaboration between these media actors can serve to amplify the voices of survivors and to shift the narrative of stories, such as moving from framing GBV as a “victim” issue to one of human rights, she said.
Call for radical shift and collective resolve
Three decades of the GMMP have produced hard evidence of the snail’s pace of progress since Beijing and give sobering insight into the future, WACC Deputy General Secretary Sara Speicher said.
“All things remaining equal, gender parity in the people seen, heard, or spoken about in the news will not happen until at least 75 years from today. So, we do need a radical shift.”
Speicher urged that this shift take the form of a broader look at how to factor in gender equality as an integral part of the media business models – as “a key element of quality journalism that strengthens public trust.”
She reminded participants of the UN Pact for the Future and its Global Digital Compact approved a year ago with extensive commitments to women and girls – including addressing representation and experiences like tech-facilitated gender-based violence in today’s information society.
“All of us need to hold Member States to the commitments they have made.”
A collective effort is needed, Speicher stressed, because reforming structures and systems takes a long time.
“Sometimes it feels as if taking two steps back is much easier than the one step forward. But we do have networks, expertise, leadership, and commitment. Together we can push past this plateau and reignite significant progress towards gender equality.”
Discover GMMP 2025 Highlights of Findings
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