Toker assumed that the gender balance in Norwegian news material would be much better than in Turkish papers.
– Norway is a western, industrialised country, with a high level of female participation in the workplace, welfare schemes that make it possible to combine family obligations and work, and with women occupying approximately 35 per cent of the seats in Parliament. The Nordic countries are thought to have moved closer to gender equality than anywhere else in the World, she points out.
– Turkey, on the other hand, is a land where women stand between traditional institutions, patriarchal norms and women’s liberation groups. Turkish society, and therefore also the female population, is divided in two: In the villages, especially in the South and South-East, women have a low status and are controlled by the norms and social rules that I would characterize as a classic patriarchy. There is also a high proportion of illiteracy among women. In comparison the women that live in the west, in the urban and industrialised areas, are relatively more free both in relation to their family and in public. They enjoy, to a higher degree, the formal rights they have as citizens under Turkey’s constitution. Nevertheless, female representation in Parliament stands at only four per cent, Toker explains.
Cracks in the equality façade
The expectation that Norwegian newspapers would beat the Turkish didn’t turn out to be correct. In her Master’s thesis in Media and Communication Toker puts a big dent in Norwegian gender equality self-satisfaction. She has compared the gender balance in the news coverage of four daily papers in Norway and Turkey during the second half of 2003. The newspapers she chose, Norwegian VG and Turkish Hürriyet, are both the biggest in their respective countries. Norwegian Dagsavisen and Turkish Akşam both had female editors at this time. 40 newspaper editions and 3519 news items were included in the investigation.
Toker counted whether the main subject of the news item was a women or a man, and what type of position/career he or she had. She investigated which gender and position the main source and the secondary source of the story had, which gender the journalist who wrote the story or the article had, which gender the people in the pictures had, what position the news item and pictures had in the newspaper, and whether the item could be characterised as soft or hard news; in other words, whether the item was about the environment, health or education – or politics, economics or business. Further, which themes dominated the items where women were prominent, and where women were portrayed.
What are they writing about?
– In both the Norwegian and Turkish newspapers most news was on art and entertainment, followed by politics and government, while economics and business came in third place. The Norwegian papers wrote more on culture and the Turkish more on economics, but that the Norwegian papers use a tabloid format while the Turkish papers were broadsheets seems to have little to do with their choice of themes, explains Yoker, as long as we disregard their front pages. While VG and Dagsavisen often have cultural items on their front pages, politics and economics dominate those of the Turkish papers. In both countries national issues receive the most attention (45 per cent), followed by international news (24 per cent) and finally local news (12 per cent). Sport was not included in the research, but would probably have been one of the top three topics. On a randomly chosen day, July 7th 2003, VG had 13 pages of sport, Dagsavisen 8 pages, while Hürriyet and Akşam both had 4 pages.
There was little on human rights, women’s rights and equal opportunities.
– One per cent of news items in the Turkish newspapers and 1,7 per cent in the Norwegian are on these topics. Only Dagsavisen stands out. It carried twice as many articles on these subjects as the other three in the investigation, Toker points out.
Women do not fill the leading roles
Women do not dominate as the main subject in the articles either. In the Turkish newspapers a woman was the main subject in 10 per cent of news articles, while the Norwegian papers can brag that in 11 per cent of their news stories a woman is the main focus. In 38 per cent of the articles in the Turkish papers women are portrayed in a negative light, against 37 per cent in the Norwegian papers. They are portrayed positively in 23 per cent of the Turkish articles against 22 per cent in the Norwegian – and in a neutral light in 65 per cent of the Turkish against 40 per cent of the Norwegian.
Women sign off less
Further, 7 per cent of the Turkish news articles were signed by female journalists compared with 11 per cent of the Norwegian. In both countries 22 per cent of articles were signed by a man. Some material is unsigned, and some is signed by journalists of both sexes.
– It’s an important discovery that the two newspapers with female editors, Norwegian Dagsavisen and Turkish Akşam had more female bylines, explains Toker.
What are the women writing about?
– In the Norwegian papers the percentage of women is higher for soft news rather than hard. However, that’s not the case with the Turkish papers. In Turkey the female journalists write twice as much hard news as they do soft. Additionally, I would mention that many, both hard and soft stories, are signed by both women and men – together. This is especially the case in Akşam for hard news and VG for soft news, Toker says.
Commentary and pictures
Commentary and feature articles are in most cases written by men. Men signed approximately half of the commentary articles in the papers, while women signed 13 per cent. VG came off worst in the analysis.
– VG gave the least space to female commentators and feature writers. In the examples I analysed there were no women among the authors of the daily commentaries on page 2, Tolker explains. The same imbalance between the sexes was found among the writers of readers letters, but here the ratio of women is higher in Norway than it is in Turkey.
Also regarding pictures men maintain a solid majority. In the Turkish papers 9 per cent of the pictures show both men and women, 11 per cent show a single woman while 24 per cent show a man. In Norway the respective figures are 7, 8 and 22 per cent.
About men and by men
– In all four newspapers news items are written by men, they are about men and their pictures depict men to a greater degree than women. Even though the gender balance is less extreme in the Norwegian papers the news coverage does not reflect the balance of the sexes Norway has achieved in business and society. The imbalance in the Turkish papers can be explained by the absence of women in most areas of public life, but that same explanation cannot be used for Norway, Huriye Toker concludes. She then asks the burning question, “Why do the newspapers in my study appear to be so similar in terms of gender representation when conditions in the two societies are otherwise so different?
– In both Norway and Turkey approximately half the students of journalism are women, actually in Norway it’s more than half. But this has not had much effect on the number of women in leading positions within media in either of the two countries. It is still men who dominate, and this can affect the gender balance in both the editorial staff and in the regular columns. My investigation shows that there is a small difference between the newspapers with a female editor and those with a male one. Another explanation can be that Norwegians live with the myth of full equality , Toker says, and expands, – Equal opportunities legislation and anti-discrimination legislation is important, but it does not create a gender balance in news coverage. It is important to ask questions regarding gender and how gender is presented in regard to what is news and how it is presented. It does not seem that gender perspective is considered in the job of selecting and presenting news, and when the gender balance is not really considered women continue to be “the other” in our picture of the news.
Questions that aren’t asked
– The media produces news, not the truth. They construct the world. They do not reflect it, she points out.
– A news item comes to be through a series of choices characterised by the opinions and assumptions of editors and journalists, and the society they are a part of. First and foremost this is about deciding what is news, and thereafter everything from headlines, pictures and the choice of words. There needs to be someone in this process who asks questions about how gender is represented, and who understands how women’s subordination is continually reproduced. The media should be asking questions of society. It is in their mandate. When they fail to do this they don’t only give an unbalanced view of reality but in addition they reproduce injustice and inequality, the media scientist underlines, before concluding: – The challenge is not to increase the ratio of women by a few per cent, but to explore and change the structural values and practices that create the sizable gender imbalance in news coverage in two lands as different as Norway and Turkey.
Translated by Matthew Whiting KILDEN
Huriye Toker has taken a Master degree at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. Her Master's thesis was entitled Two Countries: one pattern. A Comparative Study of Gender Representation in the News of Norwegian and Turkish Newspapers. Toker was born in Germany and has her education and work experience partly from Turkey, partly from Germany and partly from Norway.