Female expertise in demand? Visibility of female compared to male scientific experts in German media coverage of seven risk debates

Female expertise in demand?
Visibility of female compared to male scientific experts in German media coverage of seven risk debates

This year’s IAMCR is dealing with “challenges” for media and communication. One such challenge, which the call for papers names, is inequalities in environmental, science, and risk communication. Our presentation deals with inequalities regarding the visibility of female scientists in German news coverage about three environmental (glyphosate, nitrogen oxides, and dioxin) and four health risk debates (COVID-19, Ebola, pandemic flu, and antibiotic resistance). As a fair representation of women is one of the most discussed questions of our time (Trepte & Loths, 2020), we ask

1) how often female scientific experts have their say in media coverage on health risk debates compared to male scientists,

2) if the proportion of women and men among scientific experts in media coverage corresponds to the respective proportions of female and male scientists in the relevant research areas and

3) to their hierarchical positions within the scientific system, and

4) what role the journalists' gender plays in the selection of male or female scientific experts for media coverage.
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The question of gender diversity has already been addressed in studies on science reporting (e.g. Huber, 2014; Niemi & Pitkänen, 2017; Prommer & Stüwe, 2020; Soley, 1994). What is special about our approach is firstly that we answer our research questions from an issue-comparative perspective (instead of a single case study). Secondly, we compare the representation of female and male scientists in media coverage with extra media data, namely their representation in scientific research fields and their hierarchical positions within the scientific system. Thirdly, we also take the gender of the reporting journalists into account for our analyses.

We conducted standardized quantitative content analyses of the coverage of two German quality newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt), one news magazine (Der Spiegel) and one news agency (dpa) on the seven issues mentioned above between 1995 and 2020 (stratified random samples). We analyzed 4534 articles, in which we identified 1875 individual scientific actors (intercoder reliability: 0.75-1.00 according to Krippendorff’s Alpha). In addition, we have gathered extra media data by analyzing a random sample of n = 1972 authors of scientific publications in the research areas corresponding to the seven analyzed issues (retrieved via Web of Science).

Our results show that 1) female scientists appear less frequently than male scientists in German news media coverage on the analyzed issues (on average of all seven issues: 16% versus 83%) and 2) are underrepresented compared to their respective shares in research fields (on average of all seven issues: 29% female scientists). However, the degree of under-representation varies between the seven issues (between 11% and 27% female scientists in media coverage; between 24% and 36% in respective research fields) and 3) in sum roughly reflects the proportion of women in scientific leading positions (on average of all seven issues: 19%). 4) The gender of the reporting journalist doesn’t seem to matter for selection decisions: Female journalists select female scientific experts just as rarely as male journalists (p = 0.854). Altogether, journalism does not seem to (actively) "discriminate" female scientists, but reflects the existing structural discrimination of women in science.

References:

Huber, B. (2014). Öffentliche Experten: Über die Medienpräsenz von Fachleuten. Wiesbaden.

Niemi, M.K., & Pitkänen, V. (2017). Gendered use of experts in the media: Analysis of the gender gap in Finnish news journalism. Public Understanding of Science, 26(3), 355–368.

Prommer, E., & Stüwe, J. (2020). Wer wird gefragt? Geschlechterverteilung in der Corona-Berichterstattung. https://malisastiftung.org/wp-content/uploads/Studie_MaLisa_Geschlechterverteilung_in_der_Corona_Berichterstattung.pdf

Soley, L.C. (1994). Pundits in print: “Experts” and their use in newspaper stories. Newspaper Research Journal, 15(2), 65–75.

Trepte, S., & Loths, L. (2020). National and gender diversity in communication: A content analysis of six journals between 2006 and 2016. Annals of the International Communication Association, 44(4), 289-311.