In a finding sure to inflame the gender wars, research funded by the U.K. government suggests women around the world, and especially in Canada, are significantly more ignorant of current affairs and politics than men.
This gender gap is constant across countries as diverse as the U.S., Greece, Japan and Australia. It is as clear in Colombia, where most people scored very low on tests about current news events, as it is in Norway, where knowledge is generally high. It is as evident in the U.K. and U.S., where gender equality is well established in the culture, as it is in Japan and South Korea, where it is not.
That is, at least, according to the British report, which found consumption of news is “very much a masculine action, particularly in Canada, Norway, U.K. and U.S.”
The mystery of what causes this alleged knowledge gap is the “extraordinary question at the heart of this study,” said the lead author, James Curran, professor of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.
“I think it’s because public affairs is indeed dominated by men. It may be that there is also patriarchal bias, but it isn’t possible to determine whether reality is being distorted or whether it is merely being reflected,” he said in an interview.
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He suggested three partial explanations. One is a “historical hangover” from an age when public affairs was men’s work, and women stayed home. Another is that women can be more busy than men, with less time for news. A third is that the men seem to be more prominent in current affairs, which can discourage some women from taking an interest or feeling involved.
“The fact that political knowledge gender gaps have not shrunk in advanced industrial nations, despite women’s progress in areas such as education and work, presents a grim prospect for many developing countries,” reads the report, in the journal Global Media and Communication. It was funded by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council.
The study involved two analyses, each conducted in Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, the U.K. and the U.S.
One looked at sources used in broadcast, print and web during three pre-determined, non-sequential weeks, excluding weekends, during May and June, 2010. For television, the researchers looked at the most prominent news bulletins from the two leading networks in each country. For print and web, it was the most read stories. Overall, 30% of hard news stories on television featured female sources, which means 70% did not.
“What is clear is that TV news is dominated by men in terms of the sourcing of stories across the world,” Prof. Curran said.
Adrian Wyld / The Canadian Press filesNDP MP Megan Leslie. The study noted that, in Britain, women make up 23% of MPs, three out of 100 top companies have a female chief executive, and only one of 11 Supreme Court justices is a woman. In Canada, women occupy a similar proportion of parliamentary seats, with 76 of 308, but Canada's Supreme Court has three female judges, and one is chief justice.
The second analysis was a survey of multiple choice questions on such topics of current interest as Vladimir Putin and the Redshirts in Thailand, adjusted for the specifics of each country. One question, for example, asked what was the Copenhagen Summit: a conference on climate change, a meeting of EU heads of state, a free trade treaty, or an agreement to increase foreign aid to developing nations (it was a conference on climate change).
“Clearly, across all invested countries, women know less than men,” the report reads, provocatively.
In Canada, men answered just shy of half the questions correctly, while women correctly answered a third. That put them on par with American men, while American women answered barely one in five. Nationally, Americans were only marginally more informed than Colombians.
Norwegian women narrowly bested Canadian men, and Norwegian men scored far and away the highest, with nearly three quarters correct.
Overall, the more television news a person watched, the better informed they were, except in the U.S. and Colombia.
Canada also stood out, in that older Canadian men are clearly more informed than younger men, but for Canadian women the trend is less evident.
“In this cross-national, comparative study, we confirmed that women’s inferiority in political knowledge is a global phenomenon,” the report reads.
“This general conclusion can be explained, albeit not fully, by gender-biased hard news contents in all countries and less exposure to media by women than by men. But we also discovered that gender gaps in political knowledge were wider in societies with advanced gender equity than in those with less advanced gender equity. Particularly, men in Canada, Australia, Norway, and the U.S. score substantially higher than women.”
National Post