When An Expert Is Needed, Media Still Quotes Mostly Men
Women account for about one in four subjects and sources in the media. What on earth is going on?
Women still only account for about one in four subjects and sources in the media, according to new data from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). What’s more, that figure has barely shifted in the last 15 years.
The GMMP first started looking at gender equality in the news 30 years ago and is the world’s largest initiative to measure and advocate for women’s inclusion. Every five years since 1995, it’s taken a snapshot of the news in 160 countries on one single day.
Their most recent snapshot was taken on May 6, 2025 and there’s a lot of global variation in the data. In Asia and the Middle East, fewer than one in five people featured in the news were women. North American media fared slightly better, with representation levels of about 40%. But across the world, women were still much more likely to feature in what the researchers call “unremarkable roles”—providing eyewitness reports or examples of popular opinion. When it was an expert they needed, most media still quoted men.
The snapshot also looked at who produced the news, and there, the picture was more optimistic. In 2025, 41% of news stories in legacy media—that’s TV, print and radio—were produced by women, a significant increase on the 28% figure recorded in 1995, but still far from parity. African legacy media has the largest gender gap, with women producing just 3 out of 10 stories.
That matters because women are more likely to feature other women in their reporting. This year’s data shows that in stories produced by women, an average of 29% of sources are female, compared to 24% in stories produced by men.
Emma Haslett
Claire Cozens
Lucy Webster
Of course, the responsibility for gender equality shouldn’t all fall on the shoulders of women. But it’s all too easy a trap to fall into: When I first started working for organizations that make a conscious effort to foreground women’s voices, I reflected on my own past reporting and was shocked by how many times I’d left women out of my stories.
Often that was because I was on deadline—and male sources were easier to find. Other times, the reasons were less obvious. When I covered the arrival of more than half a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in Bangladesh in 2017, for example, almost all my sources for stories that weren’t specifically about female issues were men. The reason was simple—women in that community were much less likely to have access to education back home, so didn’t speak English and were mostly not comfortable speaking to me through my (male) translator.
But that was then. And this is now. And still many of the more insidious forces that marginalize women’s voices in the media persist.
“The deepening crises in gender equality and women’s rights in the broader environment in which news organizations are embedded call for a complete re-think of approaches, rather than more of the same,” noted the GMMP report.
I agree. A re-think can’t come soon enough.
