22 Aug 2025 WACC intern deepens skills and knowledge of gender in the news

“Very hands-on and a great learning experience,” is how Esta Yee sums up her summer internship as a project and research assistance with WACC’s Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP).

Joining the GMMP team only a few weeks after the 2025 monitoring day, the fourth-year undergraduate student in sociology and psychology at the University of Toronto had the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes researcher’s look at the largest and longest longitudinal study on the gender in the world’s media.

“One of the most important things I learned is the value of organization,” Yee says, who hopes to pursue a career as a social sciences researcher. “Being organized is essential for coordination for this huge project involving up to 100 nations’ data.”

The experience of coordinating with people in the GMMP network throughout the world to ensure no one or data fell through the cracks has given her ideas on creating an “efficient and robust environment for the research process” in the event she works with a similarly large data sample in the future.

A core task during Yee’s eight-week internship was helping to develop a review of literature on gender and media issues for the GMMP 2025 Global Report slated for publication later in the year. A chance for her to delve deeper not only into gender in news content but also issues of gender equality in the newsroom.

“I learned that advocacy is not limited to who is in the news but also who is writing the news,” the research assistant says, noting that she became aware of how sexual harassment in the media workplace and gendered stereotypes discourage women from participating in the industry.

Yee knows now that this underrepresentation of women as media professional professionals impacts how a story is framed and what biases are perpetuated in news coverage.

“If the people telling us stories of the world are not diverse, how can we expect diverse stories that truly reflect the range of things going on in our world?”

As a positive example, she recalls an article in the research she did for the literature review that showed how gender-sensitive coverage of intimate partner violence, in which victims are often women, can raise awareness and inspire affected women to seek help.

While the work was at times challenging due to not being familiar with the media industry, Yee feels she was able to connect the research she was doing for the GMMP report to the broader social contexts she has been studying. And she also learned about a new area of our social world.

As well as on her research for the literature review, Yee looks back with a sense of accomplishment on the “meticulous and perhaps slightly tedious but extremely necessary work” she did to support data quality control for the GMMP 2025 Global Report.

Yee was pleasantly surprised to be entrusted with important GMMP tasks and to experience the openness of her colleagues to new ideas. “My coworkers trusted me and gave me the opportunity to explore and learn myself. I felt like my work was valued.”

The double sociology and psychology major heads back now for one more semester of undergraduate studies and then plans to pursue a master’s degree. “I hope to continue growing and developing my skills,” she says.

Yee’s internship was made possible with support from the Canadian government’s Summer Jobs Program.

WACC summer intern 2025 Esta Yee. Courtesy photo.