Greece Outside In: Women know less about politics than men worldwide

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Women know less about politics than men worldwide

Regardless of gender equality, women are less likely to know about current affairs than men. The survey findings were consistent from Colombia to the UK

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Women know less about politics regardless of gender equality, according to a survey by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The report focused on ten nations, both developed and developing, where men and women were asked questions about domestic and international news. Despite the diversity of the ten sample countries – Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, the UK, and the US – women answered fewer questions correctly than men in every country.

10,000 participants took part in the study, which tested their knowledge of broadcast, print and web journalism. They were asked a combination of questions based on hard and soft news reports including recent international events. The hard news questions pertained to topics such as national unemployment, while soft news related to sports personalities and celebrity scandals. The level of gender equality in the nations surveyed was based on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap index ratings.

Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre at the University of London, was surprised to find that gaps in political knowledge are wider in countries that have done the most to promote gender equality. These gender gaps in Norway, the UK and the US are as large, or larger than gaps in South Korea and Japan.

Women's scores in the UK, the US, and Canada were more than 30% lower on average than men, whereas in Greece, Italy and Korea, women's average score was only 20% lower. The UK is positioned at 18/135 in the WEF gender equality rankings, while Korea is placed at 108.

Academic studies have previously found that women have higher levels of risk aversion and so are afraid of being wrong. When faced with multiple-choice questions, women are more likely to give a 'don't know' response than men. Others argue that the questions used to gauge political knowledge tend not to be gender-neutral and that women's political knowledge is more concerned with a personal experience of local politics and government programmes relating to daily life.

ESRC researchers found that the frequency with which people watch the news on television plays a role in gender gaps. Apart from Colombia and the US, the more people watch TV news, the better informed they tend to be. However, watching, reading and listening to the news tend to be more male activities, particularly in Canada, Norway, UK and US.

Age is also a factor in women's interest in political affairs. The study found that women acquire political knowledge much later in their lives than men, regardless of a country's gender equality status. This could be because women have less time to keep up with current affairs in their 30s and 40s as they spend most of their leisure time looking after family and doing housework. Meanwhile, men in advanced democracies steadily acquire political knowledge as they grow older.

"It seems that gaps in exposure to media are related to the gaps of knowledge between men and women," says Professor Kaori Hayashi, co-researcher on the report. He found that the gender-bias of hard news content in all countries plays an important role in gender gaps and underlines the serious lack of visibility of women in TV and newspaper coverage. Journalist Cathy Newman, recently raised this issue in her blog where she wrote that all broadsheet newspaper editors in the UK are male, while female journalists have to fight to get their voices hear in the newsroom.

A 2012 report by the Guardian's Women's Editor, Jane Martinson, found that 78% of all broadsheet and tabloid front-page bylines are male, while only 22% are female. Martinson also found that within the content of the news story, 79% of women were referred to as 'victims' while three-quarters of men held the role of 'expert.'

Professor Hayashi concludes that the main reasons for the gender gap in political knowledge are a male bias of media content, a lack of leisure time because of unpaid work in the home, and social norms and expectations which carry over from the past. He believes the under-representation of women in the news "may curb women's motivation to acquire political knowledge actively, and discourage them from political participation," and worries it could prevent women from becoming engaged citizens in a democratic society.