Hot Off the Press: Women & Economic News

In 2020, only 4% of economic news stories across 116 countries had women as a central focus, according to the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). The same percentage as in 2000. This did not deter us from trying to find some examples.

Here is a small selection of stories that came up on our radar and show the potential for fresh or simply important angles when putting on a gender lens.

It might sometimes feel like the gender pay gap is widely covered, but data analysis by AKAS shows that it’s not necessarily the case. Is it such an obvious issue that it gets forgotten? Or is it just difficult to cover? Either way, there are other avenues to talk about the pay gap (or even more generally wealth inequity) than by revealing the data from a survey.

For instance, the Financial Times has done so through a first-person peeling of the onion type of story: starting with the numbers and going deeper into the layers of what makes this income gap. (The fact that it’s written by a man also acts as a reminder that gender-sensitive reporting is not just for women journalists.) 

The gender pay gap and care work go hand in hand. This opens up even more possibilities when it comes to angles. For the New York Times, three journalists joined forces to show this connection in the context of the global pandemic… without even mentioning the term “pay gap” once.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic shone a light on care work, the GMMP has found that “the quality of content from a gender perspective is worse.” It turns out stories linked to the coronavirus are less likely to include women than those that are not.

Among the interesting pieces that do talk about economic gender inequality in relation to Covid, there is Bloomberg’s Big Take on how women are being further excluded from the workforce as a result of the pandemic in India. Another interesting take comes from France 24’s The 51 Percent, a show that covers all subjects with a gender-sensitive approach. They did a story on how companies are now trying to entice mothers who quit their jobs to come back to work.

In our search for this month’s recommendations, we also came across a couple of other  articles with an interesting angle. The kind that you start reading and catch yourself thinking: “Oh. That’s so true. That makes perfect sense.” Which goes to show that sometimes good stories are right under our noses, maybe even in our personal life experiences. 

Single women are losing in today’s economy — Feb 2022 — “Life is more expensive when you’re single, especially if you’re a woman.”

The recession is already here—if you’re a woman — August 2022 — “Gender inequities that existed pre-pandemic have been exacerbated. Women’s labor force participation is plummeting, and inflation is hitting products that are marketed to women twice as hard as those marketed to men.”