GLOBAL GIRL MEDIA & WAM!
Global Girl Media is a group that I discovered this last year, which I think is so important and such a great way to help ensure that girls voices are being heard. This description is taken from their FB page:
"GGM grew out of a group of female filmmakers and journalists concerned about the lack of dialogue, critical awareness or accurate representation of women and girls in new media. At present, there are fewer than 5% women in clout positions in web editorial, gaming, and social media development, while teenage girls are the most active on facebook and mobile internet use. GGM leverages new media to help young women create content that authentically reflects their lives and communities. Our model is unique in that it pairs US communities with international cities, creating a peer-to-peer international network of girls that are trained to work with small-format video, shot and shared on HD camcorders and cell phones."
They have programs in South Africa, Morocco, L.A, and Chicago. If you would like to learn more about Global Girl Media, you can check out their website below:
http://globalgirlmedia.org/
And now to WAM! Women, Action, & the Media, which is an independent national nonprofit dedicated to building a robust, effective, inclusive movement for gender justice in media. This next part comes from their Why WAM? section:
"Power and privilege is about who gets to speak and who is listened to. Most of the time, it is not women. In its most recent report, the Global Media Monitoring Project concluded, “The world we see in the news is a world in which women are virtually invisible.”
Their study found that:
Only 21% of the news subjects were women; women were more than twice as likely to be portrayed as victims and three times as likely to be identified by family status (for example, as wife or mother).
Men were 83% of the cited experts and 86% of the spokespersons.
Only 14% of those interviewed or portrayed in political or government news were female.
Women were only 20% of those interviewed or portrayed in business and economic news.
Other research supports our concerns about the underrepresentation of women in the media:
The Pew Research Center found that only 30% of U.S. news coverage included even one female source. (Cable news and PBS NewsHour fared worse with only 19% of the news stories citing a woman.)
This year, fewer than 14% of the op-eds published by the Washington Post were by women, and an equal percent by minorities.
Researchers at Rutgers University found that almost all of the academic opinions came from men: 97% in The Wall Street Journal and 82% in The New York Times.
The White House Project, a woman’s organization committed to expanding representation of women in elected office, found that only 14% of the guests on Sunday morning public affair talk shows are female, and that women were less likely to be the lead guest or be invited back for repeat appearances.
The U.S intellectual and political magazines are dominated by male writers. The male-to-female ratio of the Atlantic was 6 to 1; Foreign Affairs 6 to 1; the New Yorker, 3.5 to 1; New York Times Magazine, 2.5to 1; and the New Republic, 8 to 1. Alternative U.S. media such as Counterpunch, ZNet and Common Dreams heavily favor male writers and the guest lists of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are 75% male. Without strategies to highlight women’s voices on social and political issues, women will continue to be on the sidelines of public discourse, and policy-making. "
If you would like to learn more about the Women, Action & the Media, you can check out their link below
http://www.womenactionmedia.org/get-involved/
