22 Sep 2025 The flatline: Gender equality in media still just a dream

A Beijing+30 reflection

Exactly 30 years ago today, hope for a new dawn for women and girls was palpable.

Governments and civil society that had gathered in Beijing for the Fourth UN World Conference on Women were united on a roadmap to end gender-based discrimination and achieve equality between women and men.

An entire cultural era later, the Beijing dream remains just that – a dream.

Newly hired to support Africa’s preparations for Beijing in the context of the region’s NGO Forum, I lost myself in the technical event-management details. The substantive issues of gender inequality remained an academic exercise, a feminist consciousness not yet awakened.

Connecting the dots to the lived experience a lifetime later, it is clear that the status of women has hardly shifted. Strides made in education, in politics, in the economy, have not translated to change in how women are perceived and treated in society. Those who are also part of historically marginalized groups remain as excluded as they always were.

Media are a mirror, albeit an exaggerated one, of society. Society’s perceptions of women’s worth or lack of it, are reflected in the media.

At the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), we have followed the numbers since 1995, documenting differences in media representation of women in comparison to men. We have tracked how the differences have changed or not, across the 30 years. We have advocated, trained, lobbied, collaborated, networked, consulted, supported, and urged every possible actor in the news media ecosystem to play their part.

Progress is not linear; it has ups, downs, and seasons of stagnation. Recently released findings of our 2025 research indicate that the statistic on women’s presence in mainstream news as sources and subjects has inched up a mere nine points in 30 years to reach 26%.

The road to news gender equality just lengthened to eight decades, one more than predicted in 2020. Progress towards news gender equality began flatlining 15 years ago, after an equally long period of snailspace but sure, incremental change.

The world depicted in the news is one in which women are just a quarter of humanity. Their expertise in the professions is treated as secondary. That gender-based violence (GBV) is a feature of their everyday experience as intimate partners, workers, and ordinary people going about their business in public spaces is clearly not a concern for the media. Less than 2 percent of the news covers GBV.

The study has established patterns and trends. Women reporters are more likely to feature women as subjects than their male counterparts. Diversifying newsroom staff is not simply a hiring issue, rather, it is essential for bringing different voices into the conversation.

Influences on media representation of women and gender relations are no doubt numerous, not least, the broader environment.  The start of the plateau in progress coincides with  global, regional, and national events representing the erosion of women’s rights and push back on gender equality.

Authoritarian governments rose up in numerous nations, as did right-wing religious fundamentalism. Some rejected multilateralism and pedaled back on human rights frameworks. The global health COVID-19 crisis happened, accompanied by the second pandemic of intensified GBV.  Today, the backlash thrives online, further enabled through artificial intelligence, silencing women and deterring them from participating in public life.

Personal victories for some individual women aside, the subordinate status of the collective “we” remains, much more so for those living multiple axes of marginalization.

Thirty years post-Beijing, “gender discrimination remains deeply embedded in the structures of economies and societies” according to UN Women’s review report.  News media as a whole – rather than individual outlets – have largely been complicit in egging on this discrimination.

The experience of these past three decades and the research evidence make it clear that the way forward has, of necessity, to be radically different.

Image: Shutterstock AI