Sara De Vuyst, University of Ghent, Belgium; Young Scholars Representative of the ECREA Gender and Communication section
In October 2017, a hashtag sparked a debate that shook the media industry to its core. Under #MeToo, millions of women shared their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. The first domino got knocked over by several actresses who made allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and soon others followed in the movie industry, the music business, journalism and beyond. The hashtag quickly turned into a global movement that exposed the magnitude of this problem. Its aftermath did not stay limited to digits of zeros and ones in online spaces but even reached the highest levels of the media industry as high-placed men had to quit their positions. Does this mean the game is up for sexism in media work environments?
Feminism 2.0
The MeToo hashtag provided an excellent tool for speaking the unspeakable about sexual misconduct. It allowed women to break the silence and raise their voices on issues that are generally surrounded by an aura of taboo. Those voices are not only often ignored but also misrepresented in the mainstream media. The Global Media Monitoring Project, the largest longitudinal study on the representation of women and men, indicates how gender inequalities are sustained in and through the news media. Globally speaking, in 2015, women made up only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news, which was the same as they did in 2010. Women are mostly present in soft news that is associated with the private sphere, whereas men are dominant in hard news that is linked to the public sphere.
Specifically, sexual violence is often represented in the media as an individualized, ‘women’s issue’ that belongs to the private sphere and is not high on the news agenda. In relation to sexual harassment and assault, media reporting is characterized by mechanisms of gender bias that blame victims, excuse perpetrators and promote stereotypes of women. By doing so, media representations contribute to myths and misconceptions about experiences of sexual harassment.
In this sense, social media were an important ally to a movement that was aimed at bringing light to these issues, by providing alternative spaces where these topics could be debated, and where the personal could be made political in a few clicks. It offered women the opportunity to tell the stories that are usually untold in the mainstream media. Even more so, they could tell them in their own words and deliver alternative narratives about misogyny, power, and inequalities. Some of those stories made headlines and triggered critical reflections on who is represented by the #MeToo movement and who is not, on disparities in the reactions to different cases, and on possible changes in society.
#Backlash
However, although social media platforms provide spaces where women can share their most intimate stories of sexual harassment, it is important to note that they do not provide ‘safe’ spaces to do so. Women expressing their opinions in digital spaces are disproportionally confronted with misogynist comments, verbal and physical threats and sexual abuse online. Especially topics related to gender issues and feminism appear to be a red rag for trolls, cyberstalkers, and online harassers. Online misogyny often intersects with racism, homophobia, and ageism, which makes stories about sexual violence and discrimination vulnerable to counterattacks.
This kind of online abuse functions to decrease the opportunities and participation of women in professional environments and silences their voices. Female journalists, for example, are often forced to delete their social media platforms, or even leave journalism altogether, because they are repeatedly insulted or threatened online. In this sense, the dynamics of online harassment are quite similar to the ones of offline harassment. But whereas the emphasis of #MeToo was on making visible what happens behind closed doors, those kinds of discourses are widely available on the internet.
Few measures have been taken to ensure that experiences of sexism and harassment can be shared freely online, which creates an open field for online harassers. While social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter emphasize the potential of their platforms for awareness-raising and empowerment, the tools they have developed to combat online harassment miss their goal. In addition, media companies have not developed a solution to this problem. For example, when newsrooms decided to delete the comment section on their websites, the abuse shifted to their social media pages and the root causes were not addressed.
Moving forward
What does this tell us about sexism in media industries? Although there has been some progress towards gender equality, these developments have proven to be nonlinear and rather slow. The increase in the number of women in the media industry is recently showing signs of stagnation. Besides, numerical progress is not necessarily translated into increased visibility, equal opportunities, and a bias-free work environment. For example, a new study released by the Women’s Media Center reports that the representation of women in Hollywood increased in some categories but decreased in others, and is still fluctuating somewhere around 23%.
Keeping this in mind, it is necessary to be attentive to new obstacles that push women out of the media industry. Online harassment resembles the dynamics of backlash, a counterattack that occurs when women have made progress in order to obtain equal rights. As women have increased their presence in digital spaces, online harassment constantly reminds them that they are transgressing gender boundaries and do not belong in the public sphere. These forms of harassment have a number of negative consequences and limit the opportunities for women to build careers in the media industry.
Furthermore, it is important to take into account that sexual harassment – both online and offline – is a symptom of a broader systemic problem. It is a manifestation of gendered power imbalances in the global media industry. Traditional gender barriers such as the work-family conflict and the glass ceiling stubbornly persist. Think about Carrie Gracie, who decided to quit her position as China editor at the British Broadcasting Corporation because of a lack of parity in salary with male counterparts and is still fighting pay discrimination. In order to combat sexism in the media industry, it is not sufficient to single out the symptoms, but it is necessary to tackle the structures surrounding gender inequality. Only then it will be possible to go from punishment to prevention of sexual harassment and from window dressing to long-term cultural changes towards gender equal work environments.
