Does Media Reflect the Diversity of Our Society? [Part 1]

Advancing diversity and inclusion is one of the most critical challenges facing the media that serves the public today. It is crucial for earning trust from the audience and sustaining relevance in an era of information overload.Diversity has many dimensions: gender identity, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, mental and physical disabilities, and geographic locations, to name a few. In our first analysis of on-screen diversity in television, we focused on one of the most basic elements of diversity—gender balance, specifically, the ratio of women and men appearing on television programs, taking into consideration Japan’s slow progress in gender equality. It ranked 120th out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum 2021 Global Gender Gap Report.We aimed to visualize the current situation through data. Drawing on our preliminary research from June 2021, we planned our study as a combination of metadata analysis and coding analysis. We used metadata to capture the broad landscape of all television programs to look at the on-screen representation of men and women by age, occupational background, and program genre. We used coding analysis for further scrutiny of gender balance in evening news programs, expanding the parameters to include roles within the news, issues addressed, and whether they were named or anonymous.Our study found that women made up less than 40% in programs overall and less than 30% among those who spoke, or whose spoken words were broadcast or quoted, in news programs The representation of women diminished further when we excluded the regular members of the news program such as news anchors. The ratio of men to women among those interviewed or quoted in news items was 3 to 1, and 4 to 1 among those whose full names were mentioned and subtitled on screen.Looking at the representation by issues, the male-female ratio was more than 3 to 1 in politics, healthcare and science, as well as sports. The gap widened again when we looked at professional backgrounds: 5 to 1 among politicians—the largest group in numbers—and, in the most extreme case, 60 to 1 among medical doctors.The disparity by age group was also stark. For women, those in their 20s had the highest representation throughout all TV programs, with a clear downward curve—the older the less represented, from the 30s onwards, whereas majority of the men appearing on TV were in their 30s through 50s. The trend was the same in news programs: the largest age group among women was 19-39 whereas the majority age group in men was 40-64. The data has confirmed what has often been raised as an issue: television programs are mostly composed of “young women and middle-aged men.”We also conducted a survey to study how viewers saw this issue. A substantial percentage of respondents in their teens to 30s, and among them especially women, said that they often or sometimes felt unhappy or uncomfortable about how television featured women and men. When asked what program genres made them react that way, their answers overlapped with the genres that had a large imbalance in male-female representations.