Gender and the Media

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is the most extensive global research of gender in news media ever undertaken. When the first GMMP was conducted in 1995, few of those involved could have imagined that it would develop in the way that it went on to do. Ten years later, with the third such project now complete, the enormous significance of this international initiative is clear.

The importance of media monitoring as a tool for change was officially recognised by the United Nations for the first time in Section J of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, where NGOs and professional media associations are urged to 'encourage the establishment of media watch groups that can monitor the media and consult with the media to ensure that women's needs and concerns are properly reflected'.

The third GMMP has been as challenging and exciting as those that went before it. Seventy-six countries took part in GMMP 2005 with hundreds of monitors coding almost 13,000 news stories on television, radio and in print. Participants came from a wide range of organizations and included gender and media activists, grassroots communication groups, academics and students of communication, media professionals, journalists' associations, alternative media networks and church groups.

GMMP 2005 saw much greater participation from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states than ever before, alongside those countries from North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Western Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific which have been involved in GMMP since its inception.