Tag: “what gets measured gets done”

What do three years of data on the gender gap in news reporting tell us?

Posted on by Shari Graydon

The following op ed, co-authored with Prashanth Rao and Dr. Maite Taboada, appeared on Poynter‘s website on 28 October 2021.

Looking for silver linings in the midst of a pandemic is fraught. But here’s one that journalists need to pay attention to: Since March 2020, news media have devoted a lot more time and space to covering health care, and a lot less time and space to covering hockey fights.

In the process, they’ve featured the perspectives and reflected the realities of a much wider swath of their audience. And for news organizations looking to survive, that’s a useful shift.

The gender gap in news reporting is so longstanding it should be old news. But three years of data and more than 1 million news articles from the most influential English-language news organizations in Canada have highlighted the pitfalls with hard and discouraging data.

In October 2018, we launched the Gender Gap Tracker, a digital analytics research tool that measures in real time the ratio of men and women being quoted in online news. At the time, women’s voices constituted just 27% of the total number of quotes captured. (Because the tool relies on traditional associations of names with genders, it measures gender as a binary, a limitation that denies insight into the continuum of perspectives but remains currently unavoidable, given the technology.)

Over time, however, especially with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a recognizable uptick in the proportion of women quoted. Throughout 2021, this has been a sustained trend. On occasion, women’s voices have reached 32% (International Women’s Day, for example), but even during the recent Canadian federal election, in which the major party leaders were all male, the proportion of quotes by women continued to be around 30%.

Percentage of women sources in news stories from October 2018 through October 2021. (Courtesy: Gender Gap Tracker)

Beyond this glimmer of optimism, the Gender Gap Tracker provides useful insights into key issues of relevance to news organizations.

It’s never been a winning business strategy to chronically underrepresent 50% of your potential audience. At a time of shrinking readership and divided attention, there are clear gains to be made from featuring a greater diversity of perspectives. That became even more obvious during the pandemic, given how differently it affected women.

A related problem is what constitutes a “women’s issue.” An analysis by news topic shows that women are consistently quoted more often in so-called “soft news,” on arts and entertainment, health and lifestyle issues. In contrast, men’s voices appear much more often in articles about politics, business and sports.

Monthly gender prominence by topic of sources in news stories from October 2018 through October 2021. (Courtesy: Gender Gap Tracker research dashboard)

This reinforces both sexist stereotypes (women are caregivers; men are leaders) as well as the notion that business is more important than health care. Indeed, the ongoing tension between prioritizing unrestricted reopening of the economy over mask protocols and vaccine passports may be in part a symptom of those entrenched practices.

As the pandemic has shown, relegating to also-ran status the arenas in which women dominate (education, childcare, mental health) can have catastrophic consequences.

Analysis of who is quoted and in what role offers additional insights. Breaking down gender by profession reveals that 60% of the most quoted men and women are elected officials. This not only explains part of the gender gap, since men still dominate politics, but it also paints a more troubling picture about an over-reliance on official sources.

Elected officials often default to canned talking points or partisan interests. Journalists know this and actively seek to challenge the default in interviews. But an additional workaround would be to do a more rigorous job of supplementing government news releases with more alternative sources — including women and other underrepresented populations who are able to speak to the disparate experiences of citizens affected by the policy being proposed.

These insights reflect just a few of those available to extract from the data we amassed over the past three years. In that time, we’ve witnessed both the US 2020 presidential election and two federal elections in Canada. We’ve seen topics change with the seasons and major world events unfold, told through the words of those being quoted.

What has not changed substantially is the gender gap in media reporting. Beyond the obvious need for more equity, leaving that gap unaddressed is a missed opportunity for news organizations.

Prashanth Rao is an applied scientist with a passion for building AI systems with a social impact. Maite Taboada is a computational linguist researching social and traditional media. Shari Graydon is the founder and catalyst of Informed Opinions, an organization dedicated to amplifying women and gender-diverse people’s voices. 

It’s not radical to expect political parties to field as many women candidates as men

Posted on by Shari Graydon

(Originally published in The Hill Times 15 February 2021)

When Justin Trudeau shuffled his cabinet in January, he retained the gender balance that earned him headlines back in 2015. No one commented, because six years on, it’s become the default for the federal Liberals. That’s good news for the roughly 50 percent of the population who identify as women. 

But it’s not remotely enough — and the disproportionate impacts of COVID19 on the people whose voices are least often heard in parliament and the corridors of power have made it clearer than ever why. Women — particularly Black, Indigenous and immigrant women, and those living in poverty, or with a disability or an abusive partner — have been especially hard hit.

Even when we’re not battling a deadly global pandemic, representation is fundamental to democracy. That’s why for decades, prime ministers have appointed cabinets that respected the geographic diversity of this vast country. Ministers are carefully chosen to ensure that concerns from Western, central and Atlantic Canada are reflected around the table. So it’s appalling that it took almost an entire century after the election of the first woman MP in 1921 for gender parity to make it onto the agenda. 

Nor is such attentiveness widespread. With the exception of BC, where women hold 46% of cabinet portfolios, most of the premiers have allocated only about a third of ministerial positions to women. And it’s difficult to salute Premier Legault in Quebec for achieving 38% when Jean Charest appointed a gender-balanced cabinet in the province in 2007, before Justin Trudeau’s political career had even begun. 

The real trailblazer, however, is Alberta’s NDP leader and former premier, Rachel Notley. She extended the parity principle in a profoundly meaningful way. Speaking with Kate Graham on the podcast, No Second Chances, Notley related the conversation she had had with her staff when she became leader of her party in 2014. 

“Don’t even think about bringing me a roster of candidates that doesn’t reflect the diversity of the population,” she told them. So they did. Despite Alberta’s long history of convening among the most male-dominated legislatures in the country, 50 percent of the NDP’s nominated candidates were women, and when the party formed government, both its cabinet and its entire caucus were virtually gender balanced.

This is what leadership looks like. And in the face of entrenched barriers and incremental change, clearly leadership is what it takes. 

The early promise of this significant shift was chronicled in 2016 by journalists Sydney Sharpe and Don Braid in Notley Nation: How Alberta’s Political Upheaval Swept the Country. Citing Notley’s background as a labour lawyer and research finding that women are more inclined to collaborate than compete, they lauded her revolutionary approach to relations with the federal government. Instead of picking fights as her recent predecessors had done, she sought solutions.

Two of her cabinet members gave birth while in office, and NDP MLAs introduced a private members bill allowing women to break lease agreements if they’re in danger of violent abuse. This is now law. In response, Calgary Herald columnist Gillian Steward optimistically wrote, “No question, Alberta is setting the stage for a new normal when it comes to women in politics.”

But five years later, the province has reverted to business as usual. In the United Conservative Party, women represent just a quarter of the caucus and premier Jason Kenney has made fed-bashing a cornerstone of his approach. The UCP also appears to be going out of its way to alienate women, canceling the NDP’s popular childcare program, threatening to restrict access to abortions, and attacking female critics. 

Kenney’s record unpopularity, especially among women, is no surprise, and if an election were held in Alberta tomorrow, Rachel Notley would likely be given a second opportunity to re-establish that “new normal”.

Now that I live in the province, that gives me hope. But hope is not a strategy. And women in every region of this country deserve much better. We’re integral to the labour force and the economy, we pay taxes, and communities could not function without our unpaid work. We also teach school, deliver health care and, not incidentally, conceive, birth and raise the children our collective future depends on. 

We need an equal voice at the tables where decisions are being made. And political parties of all stripes, in all jurisdictions, need to stop pretending incremental change is defensible. The systemic barriers baked into a system designed by and for men 150 years ago is not up to the task. What’s required is the solution modeled by the Alberta NDP: recruit slates of candidates that reflect the population they seek to represent — not just in terms of gender balance, but other diversity metrics, too.

The national advocacy group, Equal Voice, has been championing the cause of gender equality in politics for more than two decades, conducting research, convening campaign schools for women and drawing attention to the problem through their inspired “Daughters of the Vote” program. 

These are laudable initiatives. But progress remains glacial, and “what gets measured gets done” has a demonstrated impact on results. More importantly — as Rachel Notley demonstrated — party leaders have the singular power to address this problem. 

Shari Graydon is the Catalyst of Informed Opinions, a non-profit working to amplify the voices of women, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse individuals and ensure they have as much influence in Canada’s public conversations as men’s.

We train women, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse individuals to speak up more often and share their insights more effectively.

We make them easier for journalists to find.

And your donation can help ensure that their perspectives exert influence in every arena that matters.

Donate button

Should journalists quote women as often as men?

Posted on by Shari Graydon

Do you think journalists should be compelled to quote women as often as they quote men? The proposition sounded a bit radical, even to me, back in 2014 when Edelman CEO Lisa Kimmel invited me to defend it in a public debate. 

Seven years on, it’s no longer a radical idea. Journalists and newsrooms across this country and around the world are now actively monitoring the sources they interview and the guests they feature in a bid to better reflect the realities of the populations they serve.

Last week with the help of media strategist and co-founder of Canadian Journalists of Colour, Anita Li, we launched #DiversifyYourSources — a campaign to encourage members of Canada’s news media to publicly pledge to track the gender of their sources to bridge the current, lamentable gap. And we’ve created a simple downloadable spreadsheet that makes it easy for them to monitor other dimensions of diversity, too.  

Many individual reporters have signed up, and more than a dozen editors-in-chief pledged on behalf of their entire newsrooms. These included Irene Gentle at the Toronto Star, Andrew Yates at HuffPost, and Steve Bartlett of Saltwater Press. 

Said Bartlett, “Media outlets must do a better job of reflecting the audiences and communities they serve. That cannot happen without diversifying the voices in their coverage. Our newsrooms are committing to do this. As a result, they’ll make an even greater difference by engaging and informing more people.”

The Toronto Star’s Irene Gentle cited “better journalism and a better society” when declaring her paper’s commitment to measuring, which predates our campaign. As her colleague, senior editor Julie Carl, noted, “We already embrace this principle, but it is always good to say these things out loud and proud.” 

Those who have pledged work in a wide variety of news formats, from online sites and multi-platform magazines to TV newsrooms and wire services. They include publishers and political correspondents, radio hosts and columnists. 

In the context of perpetual deadlines and dwindling resources, time-strapped reporters and producers aren’t really looking to add to their to-do list.  And as CBC radio host Duncan McCue notes, there’s no denying that “Diversifying your sources takes more time.” He acknowledges that “It’s not easy building relationships with vulnerable groups who have been historically left out of media. But hard work pays off, resulting in richer journalism and broader audiences.”

Our #DiversifyYourSources campaign doesn’t require those who pledge to commit to meeting a 50:50 ratio — though having news reporting and programming in all media reflect gender parity is our ultimate goal. But the tracking commitment is predicated on the recognition that “what gets measured gets done.” 

We know that for journalists who see their work as fundamental to the maintenance of democracy,  discovering from their own data that they’re seeking insight and context primarily from a small subsection of the population tends to inspire a change in practice. Adrienne Lafrance and Ed Yong of The Atlantic have both written about their experiences on this front. 

Meanwhile, a number of Canadian media organizations, large and small, have been quietly monitoring, improving and sharing their numbers for some time. 

A few years ago we publicly recognized the team behind TVO’s The Agenda for their explicit commitment to featuring as many women guests as men. And Scott White, the Editor-in-Chief of The Conversation and a board member of Informed Opinions has also led his colleagues in tracking their numbers to achieve equitable representation. 

“Calling all Canadian journalists: Join @Scott_White, editor-in-chief of @ConversationCA, and #DiversifyYourSources!

It takes less than 60 seconds to make this crucial commitment. Sign up and share today: https://t.co/zSRaF8qE1l #cdnmedia pic.twitter.com/L9aivmynO5

— Informed Opinions (@InformedOps) February 8, 2021“

In her pledge, Jennifer Ditchburn, Editor-in-Chief of Policy Options, who also serves on our board, said that 46.7% of authors contributing to her publication last year were women. Moreover, she noted, “We are also working to ensure our magazine reflects the overall diversity of Canadian society.” 

The coronavirus pandemic has likely helped increase many people’s appreciation of why these commitments are important.  Many studies and news reports have pointed out the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women — especially Black, Indigenous, and immigrant women, as well as those living in poverty, or with a disability, or with an abuser.

How can you cover a global virus that has put hospital nurses, grocery store check-out clerks and long-term care home support workers on the front lines of the battle if you’re only interviewing men? 

In fact, the over-representation of women in public health and the exceptional communication skills of Drs. Teresa Tam, Deena Hinshaw and Bonnie Henry have contributed to the increased amount of air time women sources have gotten over the past six months. The shut-down or curtailment of many professional sports leagues has also led to a corresponding dip in coverage that typically quotes women a paltry 4% of the time. 

But what happens when the pandemic ends? 

Informed Opinions’ goal is to encourage consciousness now so that in the months ahead, the monitoring habit and resulting behaviour shift cements a new normal.

As I wrote in a piece published earlier this week by Policy Options,

Journalists regularly cite as inspiration for their work the goal of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” Doing that requires much more attention to who’s being quoted, and measurement is necessary. So as part of our pledge campaign, we’ve created an electronic spreadsheet to facilitate the kind of self-monitoring that science journalist Ed Yong calls “a vaccine against self-delusion.” 

“This pandemic demands both kinds of vaccines. And our aim in encouraging journalists to embrace the responsibility they have to reflect the realities of all the citizens they serve, is a better, safer, more equitable world for all. “

We all have a stake in that.

If you’re a journalist, please sign the pledge. And if you’re not, please urge the journalists in your networks to do so.

How to Cope with the Coronavirus Shutdown

Posted on by Shari Graydon

Is it possible to eat your weight in popcorn? 

I appear to be trying. 

The pandemic lock-down has also given me permission to double my chocolate intake, consume cookies at breakfast and microwave chunks of cheese on a plate so I can scrape the stuff into my mouth with a fork. The grapes have become mere garnish, and I don’t even try to find a 5 pm Zoom date to pretend I’m not drinking alone. 

I’m not proud of this behaviour, and the fact that I have the luxury of doing it without being criticized or even interrupted at any hour of the day or night is not lost on me. I know others are negotiating divorces over lesser offences committed in too-close quarters. And some are contributing to the tragically skyrocketing calls to women’s shelters.

Reading others’ coronavirus coping mechanisms inspires or depresses me, depending on how ambitious they are and where I am on the popcorn/chocolate/cheese self-loathing cycle. But in case you’re in need of new ideas, here’s what I — and some of Informed Ops’ experts — have found helpful:

Phone calls: I’m old enough to have spent the first part of my career unencumbered by email’s demands. And yet like almost everyone else, I’ve allowed online communication to supersede the phone. Now, however, exhausted by the cognitive dissonance of virtual Zoom meetings (the video tricks your brain into believing you’re with others, but your body knows better and the impact is wearing), I often dial a contact or friend without (gasp!) emailing them to secure an appointment first. 

The intimacy of voice-only calls made while wandering around my apartment, sitting on the couch or lying on the floor feels both liberating and deeply human. 

Performance metrics: At my first non-service-industry job post-university I had to keep a time-sheet, recording my hours against the clients on whose behalf I was securing media exposure. Although I left the job after three years, three decades later, I’m still logging my hours. 

At Informed Opinions, the resulting data is complemented by other measures. These include both productivity metrics — how many workshops we deliver, women we train, experts we recruit to our online database — and evidence of impact — how many op eds they publish, interview requests they receive, and journalists we engage.  

Pandemic fears have increased some of these metrics but seriously eroded others. And when every day feels the same, and there’s no clear end in sight, being able to note even small accomplishments helps boost my mood. This means I now keep a manual spreadsheet to track the days I complete my self-imposed routine of pushups, lunges, supported shoulder stands and a dozen other stretch and strength exercises. And I check my Fitbit data more than ever. Where before I paid attention primarily to my step count, now I’ve become manic about minutes of activity and number of hours I’m moving. (On balance, given my consumption confessions above, I think this qualifies as a healthy tech addiction.)

Romantic comedies: Movies I previously turned my nose up at because of their predictability (plucky heroine! deal-breaking secret! happy ending!) I now seek out precisely because the characters’ arcs are so familiar and a satisfying resolution is guaranteed to arrive within two hours (as opposed to, say, 18 months).

Last weekend alone I watched both Maid in Manhattan and The Wedding Planner. I did find the retro Cinderella story vibe of the former and the excessive consumption ethos of the latter grating, but I also loved the warm embrace of the hotel staff sisterhood and geriatric scrabble players who had Lopez’s back in the two films. 

Also, and not incidentally, because I’m currently watching Ozark with my partner long-distance, the rom-coms provide a necessary break from the thrumming undertone of threatened — and sometimes graphically realized — violence in the much more sophisticated and satisfying-in-other-ways programming.  

Writing: Despite having ample time to complete a still unfinished funding application, I have repeatedly stepped away from my computer to mop my kitchen floor, watch origami videos and make massive vats (yes, plural) of my favourite pasta sauce. 

But writing that gives me an opportunity to express how I feel? That I make time for. Last week I discovered that Toronto-based poet Dwayne Morgan was offering an online session that night for a $10 contribution. Tough call: finish tallying my 2019 receipts so I could finally submit my tax return, or hang out with Dwayne? His gentle prompts helped me translate a little of my own sadness into something that might be relatable to others.

Many of the experts profiled in our database are being called upon to share their insights on Covid-related issues, and a number have offered their own coping advice:

Running to catch the light — and creating the “Transformational 20s”

Posted on by Shari Graydon

Is patience still a virtue? 

When teaching kids, or walking behind those forced by age or disability to slow down, absolutely. But as Australia burns, and bellicose men on either side of the world threaten war, I feel with greater urgency than ever that change can’t happen quickly enough.

My partner would tell you that patience has never been my virtue. If the “walk” sign appears when I’m half a block away from the intersection, I will break into a sprint — even if I’m carting fragile eggs and an unwieldy watermelon.

Broken eggs aside, impatience has its virtues. 

The women who fought to ensure that the rest of us get to vote, take maternity leave, and be paid commensurate with our equally qualified male colleagues, were not a patient bunch. Meaningful change of any kind requires that people who are dissatisfied enough with the status quo not put off agitating today for what they think should have been available yesterday.

Impatience gets sh*t done. It’s the very air that activists and the ambitious of all kinds breathe.   

A few years ago I came across a persuasive op ed published in The Globe and Mail about the controversy around foreign workers. The byline identified its author, Catherine Connelly, as a prof at McMaster University. I had recently delivered an op ed writing workshop on the Hamilton campus, and at first thought she must have attended. But she hadn’t. I reached out anyway to compliment her on her thoughtful media intervention. 

“Great op ed,” I wrote. 

“Great lecture,” she replied.

Although Catherine hadn’t participated in my workshop, she had attended a public talk I gave at the university on the same trip. She told me that my talk had inspired her to translate the research she was doing into a newspaper commentary. She was too impatient to wait for the next workshop, so she wrote and pitched her op ed without additional support. Its publication in The Globe then helped her secure additional research funding.

I founded Informed Opinions ten years ago, believing that the way to bridge the gender gap in Canadian public discourse was to ensure enough expert women had the tools and motivation to write commentary and say “yes” to media interviews. 

In those 10 years, we’ve delivered media engagement training and support to more than 3,000 extremely knowledgeable women from across disciplines, sectors and the country. We’ve built a database to make them easier for journalists to find. And when that didn’t move the needle as fast as we’d hoped, we built an online digital analytics accountability tool — the Gender Gap Tracker — in the hopes of incentivizing a change in behaviour. 

As a result, a significant number of the women we’ve supported have amplified their voices and raised their profiles through public discourse. Many have also increased their impact and experienced expanded professional opportunities.

But the progress overall remains incremental, and I’m more impatient than ever. Every morning when I walk up one side of the Rideau Canal and down the other, I chant the following affirmation:

“You easily attract all the funding, resources, talent and buy-in necessary to successfully bridge the gender gap in Canadian public discourse by 2025.”  

Increasing women’s share of written commentary, feature interviews and cited quotations from 28% (what it is now) to 50% in five years might sound laughably optimistic, but we believe it’s both essential and achievable. 

Corporations and governments alike have invested in all kinds of efforts aimed at advancing equality for women. Most of those efforts have been met with systemic resistance. But in the media realm, some journalists — both in Canada and elsewhere — are already achieving gender parity in the sources they quote. And the answer to who and how is simple: what gets measured gets done. 

And here’s why that matters beyond the media: the Gender Gap Tracker allows us to measure the gains made in public discourse in real time. And they can be leveraged to increase women’s participation, leadership opportunities and profile elsewhere. Amplifying the voices and visibility of qualified women with expertise across disciplines makes it easier for all women to see themselves as leaders, easier for political parties and conference programmers and executive recruiters to identify potential candidates, and more difficult for organizations of all kinds to claim that women capable of serving in any of those capacities don’t exist.

We’re impatient to realize the future we’ve been envisioning and working towards for ten years. And we’ve developed smart, strategic plans to get there.

In the meantime, people are musing aloud about what the next ten years should be labelled. Here at Informed Opinions, merely one week in, we’ve already decided, designating them:

The Transformational 20s.

This is not wishful thinking on our part, it’s intentional action. We live in starkly sobering times. From the growing recognition of our terrifying environmental vulnerability, to revenge-driven threats of war, to the aftermath of the #MeToo movement… We are reminded in every news cycle of the democratic necessity of including diverse women’s voices in decision-making of all kinds.

Impatience is not just desirable, it’s demanded.  That’s why we are running as fast as we can to catch the light — both actually, at the intersection, to move forward, and metaphorically, in the world, before darkness descends. 

Here’s how you can help us:

  1. Book a workshop or keynote. We’ve documented in detail how impactful the former are, but if you’re impatient, and can convene a larger group, the latter are great for the impatient. We can usually accommodate 10 or 20 in a training session, but we can motivate action in 100 or 1000 people with a keynote. 
  2. Share your insights where they can make a difference. That stuff you know that most people don’t? That has implications for the health or safety or prosperity of others? Find a way to amplify your voice and increase the audience able to make use of your knowledge. The Learning Hub section of our website has lots of free resources aimed at helping you. 
  3. Encourage journalists and news organizations near you to track the gender ratio of their sources to better reflect the realities of the 50% of the population they’re currently under-serving (and to broader their own audience!). Our website features a free, downloadable spreadsheet to make it easy for them to do so.
  4. Donate to Informed Opinions to jumpstart the Transformational 20s. Help us keep our database free to both expert women and the journalists looking to feature them.

Featuring more female sources could increase your audience engagement, research suggests

Posted on by Shari Graydon

This article was originally published on Poynter

What would happen if news media struggling to survive applied the productivity mantra “What gets measured gets done” to the sources they quote?

Business research, Hollywood sales data and anecdotal evidence from the news industry itself all suggest it’s worth a try.

In many western democracies — the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada included — most major news organizations continue to feature three or four times as many men as experts or sources as they do women.

This might have been more defensible a generation ago. Male CEOs, politicians and professionals were the norm, and we weren’t so clear about the costs of failing to consider how profoundly different men’s and women’s bodies and lives are when developing drugs, policies or programs.

But reams of respected business research has since found that when organizations draw on the talents of women, they make more informed decisions, better serve their customers and are ultimately more profitable. And continuing to rely primarily on a white, male subsection of the population to offer commentary and analysis when you’re trying to engage culturally diverse audiences that are 50% female? That hasn’t made sense for decades.

Nor is it good journalism. Diverse sources are a hallmark of responsible reporting. For news to effectively fulfill its democratic obligations, it needs to reflect the diverse perspectives of the citizens it purports to serve. Doing so is likely to engage more of them.

Entertainment box office figures are instructive. TV and film executives once believed that female audiences would watch programs aimed at men, but the reverse was not true. That rationale helped to justify decades of male-centric movies.

But a 2018 study found that on average, female-led films earned higher revenues than male-led films released in the same year. In an age of on-demand programming from a multitude of providers, the tastes of teenage boys no longer rule. Audiences want good storytelling and to see their realities reflected on large and small screens alike.

Good journalists understand this and many are already attempting to capitalize on a similar dynamic in terms of how they report and who they feature. Senior staff at Bloomberg and The Atlantic have been leading this charge for years. And in 2018, the BBC explicitly committed to meeting a 50:50 challenge, ensuring the equitable representation of male and female sources by this coming April.

Anecdotally, some media are discovering that such attention pays off. The producers of La sphére, a Radio Canada program that covered technology, noticed that efforts to achieve gender parity among guests corresponded with an increase in listeners. And The Financial Times determined that reframing one of its electronic newsletters to engage female readers inspired higher “open” rates among male readers as well.

Informed Opinions, the non-profit I lead, is looking to inspire others to mimic these experiments. We recently collaborated with scientists at Simon Fraser University to adapt the incentivizing power of a fitness tracker to this challenge. Leveraging the technology behind voice-activated assistants like Siri and Alexa, we created a tool designed to motivate journalists to pay more attention to the gender ratio of their sources.

Using big data analytics, our Gender Gap Tracker monitors the ratio of male to female sources quoted in Canada’s most influential news media. Its easy-to-read graphs are updated on a daily basis and reflect both the performance of individual newsrooms, and aggregate data from them all. From October through January, women’s voices remained steady at about 25 percent.

Most journalists know that doesn’t reflect well on either their journalism, or their audience engagement prospects. Beleaguered by industry disruptions, and competitive by nature, many are eager to improve. In fact, since we launched the Tracker on Feb. 4, women’s voices have increased by 4 percent.

This improvement has been aided by a number of grassroots women’s groups that have created databases of expert women across a wide range of fields. Our collective goal is to make it easier for journalists to find female sources who are both qualified and eager to share their insights.

Anyone familiar with the incentivizing power of a fitness tracker understands that what gets measured is more likely to get done. Like the 10,000-step crowd, news media may discover that the quantification leads to life-sustaining health benefits.

In numbers there is strength – how big data can help close the gender gap in Canadian journalism

Posted on by Shari Graydon

This article was originally published in The Ottawa Citizen

We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is taking away jobs and making it easy for foreign powers to hack democracy. But some scientists are hunched over their computers in an effort to harness the power of big data analytics for social good.

A new tool just launched by Informed Opinions is a case in point. We collaborated with a team of researchers at Simon Fraser University’s big data lab to develop a sophisticated digital monitoring system. It’s now measuring, in real time, the gender ratio of sources being quoted online by some of Canada’s most influential news outlets. It analyzes in microseconds what it used to take researchers hours to assess.

If only the data it reveals were more encouraging.

How grim are the statistics? Type gendergaptracker.informedopinions.org into your browser and see for yourself. You can access data as far back as October 2018, but no matter which date range you select, the aggregate percentage of women’s voices never moves above 26 per cent. For context, that’s a mere four-point increase over data we collected almost three decades ago.

And yet, in the intervening years, women have achieved significant advancement in virtually every field. They’ve become premiers and astronauts, Supreme Court justices and university presidents, corporate CEOs and award-winning scientists and entrepreneurs. And while it’s true that more men still lead governments and corporations, our research has found that even in health care disciplines, where women dominate, their voices remain under-represented.

That’s a problem. Women’s life experiences are often profoundly different from men’s. Those experiences feed different insights and sometimes priorities. So it’s not remotely defensible in a proud democracy that men’s perspectives continue to outnumber women’s by a ratio of almost three-to-one in public discourse. We can – and need to – do better.

Informed Opinions last commissioned content analysis research looking at the gender ratio of quoted and featured experts in 2015. Canada’s prime minister had just sworn in a new gender-balanced cabinet, and we were edging towards the #MeToo revelations that would remind everyone of the social consequences of failing to listen to women’s perspectives.

The aggregate ratio of experts quoted in the 2015 study was 29 per cent women to 71 per cent men. But that analysis left out both sports and entertainment coverage. It also included two broadcast talk shows: CBC Radio’s The Current, and Radio Canada’s Tout le monde en parle. Both programs exceeded 40 per cent female interviewees, raising the average stats overall.

In fact, the better performance of public broadcasters on gender parity planted the seed for the Gender Gap Tracker. Because Radio Canada and CBC are explicitly mandated to reflect the country to itself, their reporters and producers pay more attention to diversity. What gets measured does, indeed, get done. Anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that journalists who actively track the gender of their sources achieve more equitable results. And a growing number are reporting on their performance.

The mixed gender team of scientists developing the Gender Gap Tracker includes researchers from across disciplines. They hail from Canada, Iran, Brazil and Spain and they’ve worked in the U.S., the U.K. and Switzerland. A microcosm of Canada’s diversity, they tangibly demonstrate the payoffs of collective intelligence that benefits from different perspectives.

We’ve set 2025 as the target date for achieving gender parity in Canadian news media. The Gender Gap Tracker, though, is just a tool. To make a difference, journalists need to actively seek to improve the data – and news consumers need to give them reasons to do so.

What Impact are We Having? What More Can We Do?

Posted on by Shari Graydon

We recently surveyed hundreds of women who’ve participated in our workshops and remained on our mailing list. Email overflow and work-life demands being what they are, we were happy to log 57 responses from women in 16 cities across the country. They gave us insight into what use they’ve made of the training we deliver, and how else we might be able to support them in continuing to amplify their voices.

Positioning yourself for impact

I recall hearing advice growing up that “it’s not what you know but who” that makes a difference to your career. But actually, it’s who knows you that’s more important. And visibility allows you to be seen, and your potential to contribute to be recognized. That dynamic is central to what we do and why.

That’s why we were very gratified by the responses women gave to the question:

What kind of engagement with media have you had in the past 7 years?

Eva Pomeroy published five op eds in 2015, three in print media and two online, and did two radio interviews. She says the idea of going to the media would never have occurred to her, but she now appreciates the impact she’s able to have addressing issues she knows and cares about.

We also asked what kind of feedback or sense of impact women had experienced as a result of their increased profile. Here’s what they said:

Not all the news was good. Predictably, 29% of women received negative feedback from trolls or haters online, and 13% were criticized by colleagues. Although neither of those experiences are pleasant, on balance, the positive results of increased exposure far outweighed the negatives.

Indeed, in a response to a more general question about what impact, if any, attending our programming or engaging with media had had,

“82% cited increased confidence and/or sense of agency;
56% cited increased recognition, visibility and credibility.”

If she can’t see you, she can’t be you

The enhanced professional opportunities that flow from increased visibility constitute individual benefits. But the global impact of more diverse and visible female role models is also profound.

When Adrienne Clarkson was Governor General, she was often approached by Asian Canadian girls who were wide-eyed with the suddenly expanded possible futures they could imagine for themselves as a result of seeing someone who looked like them in the prestigious and influential role of Vice Regal.

Your visibility – as a politician or CEO, chemical engineer or doula, mining executive or chiropractor – makes it easier for girls and young women to envision themselves in a similar role. And most of those your role modelling inspires won’t ever have the chance to tell you. But the absence of that communication in no way lessens your impact.

We also asked members of our network to weigh in on what kinds of support from Informed Opinions they continue to value, or would like to see us take on in the future.

Almost three-quarters (74%) expressed interest in the kind of media engagement tips and tools that we deliver in our workshops, and share through this blog and on social media. (If you’re not already receiving notice of new blog posts by email, you can join our Linkedin Group or sign up for our blog.) Another 72% requested additional training workshops to help build and refine skills.

Many said they appreciated the work my colleague Samantha oversees in promoting their expert profiles or media commentaries to journalists (63% and 58% respectively). And well over half (58%) encouraged us to convene events that would permit them to connect with other media-engaged expert women. Slightly under half (46%) expressed interest in free webinars that would permit them to get answers to specific questions related to their media engagement.

Where Do Our Experts Engage Online?

How We’re Going to Bridge the Gender Gap by 2025

Last fall we announced What Gets Measured Gets Done – a new initiative that tracks the data to measure the male and female voices being quoted and featured in Canada’s most influential news media. Our explicit goal is to achieve gender parity by 2025 by celebrating the leaders and encouraging the laggards to do better. Almost two-thirds of our grads (63%) expressed interest in supporting this endeavor, so we’ll be looking to them to share the data we collect with their networks.

Survival Guide for Women in the Workplace

Finally, 53% of our network expressed interest in a “Surviving & Thriving in the Workplace Guide for Expert Women”.  Although I relished the idea of writing this book, anticipating its enormous audience, it turns out Jessica Bennett has already written it.

She called it Feminist Fight Club – A Survival Manual (For a Sexist Workplace), and it’s a gem: funny, deeply resonant and chock-full of practical advice. She drew on both her own daily office experiences as well as those of a small group of smart, articulate and ambitious women. Together they offer an arsenal of strategies that include snappy comebacks, encouraging pep talks and strategically smart action steps.

5 Resolutions to maintain 2017’s momentum

Posted on by Shari Graydon

If 2017 goes down in history as a year of resolve, what will we say about 2018? That we built on the momentum to make lasting change, or that we let the energy dissipate into nothingness?

From women’s marches around the world to the #MeToo movement, many people took not just to social media, but to the streets, speaking up against hate, inequality and violence.

Women, in particular, shared their realities in ways and in numbers that got global attention and sent shock waves through a host of industries, from Hollywood and high tech to policing and restaurants.

But genuine revolution requires persistence: we need to continue challenging unconscious biases, dismantling entrenched systems, and redistributing power. We need to translate last year’s manifestations of resolve into actual resolutions – and then act on them. And we need leaders who are willing to take a stand and publicly spearhead this revolution.

Is that you? Someone you work with — or for?

Here are 5 suggestions for how to keep amplifying women’s voices for change in 2018:

  1. Publicly announce your commitment to support gender equality in the media and donate $1,000 for a tax receipt in support of “What Gets Measured Gets Done”, the high tech dashboard we’re building to track women’s voices in the media;
  2. Ask women in your workplace what’s needed to overcome the barriers to their advancement, and then commit to implementing meaningful measures that will benefit them and your bottom line;
  3. Nominate qualified women from your organization or network who are able to speak to media for inclusion in ExpertWomen, our online database designed to make it easier for journalists and conference programmers to feature smart women;
  4. Talk to us to explore how we might partner with you to amplify women’s voices in Canada and raise awareness at corporate events;
  5. Book a Finding Your Voice, or Building Allies for Change keynote or workshop combining research insights and concrete take-aways with storytelling and humour to engage and motivate your colleagues.

What Gets Measured Gets Done – #WGMGD

Posted on by Shari Graydon

This conversation should be over:

The business case for drawing on the entire talent pool is now unassailable — dozens of studies over more than two decades make clear that including women’s informed opinions makes companies more profitable, boards more effective, and research more relevant.

Most people no longer accept the absence of women’s insights and contributions as defensible; #HeForShe initiatives are springing up across North America; even senior male leaders in the tech and banking sectors have publicly declared their unwillingness to serve on panels made up only of guys.

And yet in one of the most progressive countries in the world, women’s voices in the public discourse remain outnumbered by a ratio of more than two to one.

The good news is that in 2010, when we launched Informed Opinions, the ratio was actually four or five male voices to every female one. So our efforts over the past seven years — training, motivating and supporting hundreds in getting their commentaries published, and many hundreds more in saying “yes” to interviews — have made a difference.

But we’re aiming to move from an average of 29% female sources, speakers and experts to an average of 50% by 2025. While the goal is ambitious, we know it’s achievable, because some news media organizations are already there. And what sets them apart from their less attentive competitors is that they’re paying attention and making an effort.

That’s why we’re now gearing up to launch our What Gets Measured Gets Done campaign.

To achieve our goal of reaching 50% female sources, speakers and experts quoted and featured in Canadian media, we will:

  • Collaborate with researchers and computing experts to monitor the gender representation of people quoted and featured in influential media, issuing an annual report card documenting progress relative to the benchmark data we already have;
  • Celebrate the leaders who recognize that democracy demands the news media play a pro-active role, and include diverse women’s voices and encourage the laggards to do better; and
  • Engage citizens to insist that they do.

We’re launching What Gets Measured Gets Done on October 18th, celebrating the anniversary of the Persons Case at an event on Parliament Hill.

In the process, we’ll recognize the incredible contributions of distinguished University of Ottawa law prof and indefatigable activist, Elizabeth Sheehy.

Although she has been speaking up for women’s legal rights her entire illustrious career, since participating in the second media engagement workshop we ever delivered in 2010, Ms. Sheehy has written and published 23 commentaries and given more than 100 interviews. Her extraordinarily well-informed opinions on issues related to all forms of violence against women have enlightened readers, listeners and viewers on a range of critically important aspects of the criminal justice system, and how it treats women who are victimized.

We’re also paying tribute to the producers and hosts of TVO’s The Agenda. The weekday news and public affairs program has not only helped to lead the conversation about the need for women’s voices in public discourse, it has also demonstrated that journalists who make an effort to include diverse sources — gender and otherwise —  can deliver context and analysis that is much more reflective of the diverse perspectives available in Canadian society.

Summer host Nam Kiwanuka will be on hand to represent the entire Agenda team, including regular host Steve Paikin, executive producer, Stacey Dunseath, and all their colleagues, who together have consistently achieved more than 45% female guests for more than two years now.

Here’s how you, too, can make a difference. Please:

  • Share our infographic;
  • Follow us on Twitter or Facebook so you see future campaign pieces as they’re released; and
  • Contact senior news editors, program and conference producers of the media you consume, and the events you attend to insist on greater diversity of perspectives.

What Gets Measured Gets Done is a business mantra frequently touted by executives as an effective means of monitoring performance and productivity. And millions of people sporting fitness trackers can attest to the motivational power of data to get them moving. You can help us to mobilize that kind of measurement and attention to bridge the gender gap in Canadian public discourse.

(In the meantime, for more on the relevance of “What gets measured gets done” in application to equality, see an earlier commentary published in the Ottawa Citizen on the inclusion of women on boards. Given the report just issued by Osler Hoskin Harcourt last week, it remains discouragingly relevant.)

Support our What Gets Measured Gets Done campaign and help us close the gender gap in Canadian public discourse by 2025. As a charitable non-profit, we’re able to issue tax receipts for all donations.