- The National Audiovisual Institute (INA) analyzed 400 hours of information during the health crisis in the spring, based on the banners or inlays of five television news reports.
- Result: women are in the minority (28%) and especially women with some "authority" (21%).
- "We could have imagined that in a moment of health crisis women could have a more important place", laments Marlène Coulomb-Gully, one of the three academics to have worked on this assessment.
What place did women occupy in the media during the coronavirus crisis? A weak place, and even weaker when we look at the positions that have the most power, reveals a study by the National Audiovisual Institute (INA), unveiled this Tuesday by 20 Minutes . In the five television news programs of TF1, France 2, France 3, BFM and CNEWS analyzed for a month, only 28% of women appear in banners or "incrustations", and even 21% when we focus on women with of the strongest "authority", excluding journalists.
It is not possible to strictly compare this study with other previous studies, with different methods, but the work of the INA still comes to consolidate that of the Superior council of audio-visual which appears at the same time on the same theme, which notes a significant decrease in the rate of female experts, which went from 38% in 2019 to 20% during the health crisis.
"We could have imagined that in a moment of health crisis women could have a more important place", laments Marlène Coulomb-Gully, one of the three academics to have worked on this assessment of the INA carried out between March 17 and April 11, on eight dates corresponding to Tuesdays and Saturdays. In France, nearly 46% of doctors are women, according to a study by Dares (Department of Research Animation, Studies and Statistics, attached to the Ministry of Labor), and they are in the majority among professionals and health professionals.
Women (excluding journalists) are in the minority in the inlays of the news broadcast during the confinement, and they are even more so when it comes to speech with authority. While the share of men with strong authority in banners is 77%, it is only 55% for women.
In the field of health, from which a third of the people from the banners come, and while the health crisis occupied almost three quarter of the air time, the women invited are almost four times more endowed with a weak authority than men in the same field: 14% against 3.5%.
"The word of authority remains masculine"
To analyze this fact, the researchers Marlène Coulomb-Gully and Cécile Méadel encoded the women and men present in the banners as "strong authority" or "weak authority". Cashiers, truckers, waiters, nursing assistants or nurses were given a “weak authority”, while doctors, medical teachers, ministers, chief executives or managers received the “strong authority” label. mayors interviewed. Almost 400 hours of program work and 2,500 individuals were analyzed in a “double blind” manner, each researcher coding the individuals for their part, the results then being compared.
"The word of authority remains masculine," sums up Cécile Méadel, while Marlène Coulomb-Gully believes that "as always, the news widens the disparities, which obviously exist". Only 20% of professors (PU-PH: university professors - hospital practitioners) of the APHP are professors. "This period of crisis functions as a revealer in the chemical sense of the term of the functioning of the media which still invisibilizes the invisible and endorses the word of authority, which is a male word", adds Marlène Coulomb-Gully.
An experiment called to develop
This INA study on headbands is a first of its kind, advance the researchers, who estimate that it allows to analyze large volumes, here 400 hours of program. It was coordinated by David Doukhan, who stood out in March 2019 for having analyzed almost 700,000 hours of program with artificial intelligence tools detecting the voices of women and men. He is leading the GEM (Gender Equality Monitor) project, which aims to automatically describe the differences in representation between women and men in the media, and in which this study is part.
"I had the intuition that the banners were things that could be extracted automatically in a reliable way," explains the computer researcher, who explains that this is an "experiment" called to develop . The analysis of the France info and LCI channels, initially envisaged, had to be abandoned because of the excessive transparency of their banners.
A report by MP Céline Calvez
The INA study comes a few weeks after strong criticism from associations, feminist personalities and the High Council for Equality concerning the low presence of women in the media during the health crisis. These criticisms were in particular triggered after the front page of the newspaper Le Parisien dated April 5, depicting four men to draw the "world after".
Télérama , Le Monde , Corse Matin and even CNews have also been the subject of criticism from collectives of women photographers and journalists such as La Part des femmes and Prenons la une *. The outcry prompted Secretary of State Marlène Schiappa to launch a mission on the place of women in the media, entrusted to deputy Céline Calvez.
The deputy makes this Tuesday a progress report which recommends in particular “to continue the enrichment of the indicators of the annual report of the CSA, in function in particular of the studies of the INA. "If we can use the incredible power of the INA for research, we must also be able to do so to make a difference," she said at 20 Minutes . The idea is to count down more finely in times of crisis, in particular by separating the broadcasts of knowledge, information and debates. In order to better understand, when it comes to experts or people with the most authority, where the rub is, and why, in times of crisis, these women disappear.
* The journalist author of this article is a member of the Prenons la une association.
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- INA
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- gender equality
- Confinement
- Discrimination
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- Coronavirus
- Television