The Covid-19 health crisis has had many consequences, including that of making women even more invisible in the media. A finding underlined by a government report on the subject.
"Never forget that all it takes is a political crisis, economic or religious so that women's rights are called into question. These rights are never acquired. You will need to remain vigilant throughout your life. »
Does the health crisis prove Simone de Beauvoir right ? Still, the finding has fallen : the confinement accentuated the decline in the representation of women in the media. Often present in reports as witnesses of everyday life, conversely, they are rarely invited to the airwaves and airwaves to provide their expertise and their critical eye on the news. A role mostly attributed to men. Whether it is television, Of the radio, print media or digital, gender stereotypes have regained force in the face of the emergency health crisis. In any case, this is what recent studies carried out by the INA show (National Audiovisual Institute), le CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council) and the government, who submitted his report on the subject at the start of the 2020 school year.
Gender stereotypes
We learn that, although women represent 52% of the French population, only 41% were present on the air and airwaves during the confinement period. On the other hand, they were over-represented among the witnesses (55 %) to talk about how they were experiencing the health crisis, confinement or home school. Furthermore, they were once again assigned to the care professions (nurses, nurses) or frontline (cashiers). A l’inverse, men have been ubiquitous in the media (57% speaking on average and up to 80% on certain television channels) to act as experts in virology, in economics or international relations.
This phenomenon of the invisibilization of women is concrete : in the evening on average, if you watch TV from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m., you will see and hear men for 1 hour 30 minutes ! This under-representation in the media is only part of a generally unequal society. We see the same problem among entrepreneurs. So, the fourth edition of the Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, ranking analyzing the progress made by 58 countries to increase the number of women entrepreneurs, positioned France in eighteenth position. A place that testifies to the efforts still to be made to make women visible in the economic world.
