Growing interest in Sweden

A short summary of Three Weeks of Global Action

By Maria Jacobson, national coordinator and member of the media watch group NGO Allt är Möjligt

Media response – but slow

The Swedish national report is titled Count on Women! The title is alluding to counting as in monitoring but also to counting as in taking women seriously in news and society at large.

When the national and global reports were launched the 16th of February we, the monitors, thought that GMMP would be considered something uninteresting that women usually are busy with. The media was almost silent to begin with. But articles in the weeklies The Worker and Gothenburg Free Press the same week as the 16th later had followers.

For example Pressens Tidning, the weekly owned by the press owners associationhad an article on the web and later a pretty big feature story in the paper version. And there has been more, both news articles and report reviews and radio items. The most interesting might be that none of the monitored programs or newspapers has mentioned the study in their own reporting. Only Dagens Nyheter, the largest daily, wrote about the global report in a readers ombudsman column. She was not aware that her newspaper was included in the monitoring.

Events in newspaper and in public

But one of the monitored newspapers, Nerikes Allehanda, a large regional paper in Örebro, invited me to lecture about gender and gender equality in the news and media in the end of February for all editorial staff. We – editor in chief and I - made this an event of Three weeks of global action.

The regular lecture of Allt är Möjligt always contains a section aboutgender pattern in socialrepresentation in the news and other genres and a section about gender stereotyping, including pornophication and sexualization.

When I have gigs in editorial environments I usually do a gender critical reading of the paper for a few weeks to find out how gender is established in that particular paper. For example I list positions of women and men who appear in the news. I count pictures on page one and I bring up gender ”making”and gender ”blindness” in text as well as in images. Also I point out examples that challenges gender stereotyping. I include the findings in my power point presentation and usually there is a good discussion emanating from the examples.

Further I talk about the power of stereotyping and the western way of structuring thinking in dichotomies, like man-woman, white-black, winner-loser and discuss the media dramaturgy in terms of these dichotomies. Then I discuss how the Swedish political idea of gender equality opposes that idea of men and women as opposites. Gender is regarded as a social construction partly separated from biological sex. We deal with the gender power order in explaining how women are subordinated in society and how the normative male logic is dominating our culture and society. This is a framework as well as the Beijing Platform for our lectures and workshops.

But before this event took place, we did another. Maria Edström, a PhD-student and founder/member of Allt är Möjligt, and I had a presentation of Who Makes the News? and Count on Women! in the Museum of World Culture in Göteborg, Sweden. Not a lot of people showed up but the ones that were there were really interested. We did a nice power point presentation. We talked about media activism and media research co-operating in GMMP and where the Swedish media research in this area is today and what the role of media activism is.

On the 8th of March Sweden had a distinguished guest in Erika Cervantes from Mexico, representingCimaq and International Network of Journalists with Vision of Kind in Mexico. In Stockholm she talked about her experiences at the Swedish kick offfor a gender network of journalists, called the Wendela Hebbe Group. (Wendela Hebbe was an early Swedish reporter)

I participated withmade a short speech about GMMP and the reports as well as about my own experiences of almost 15 years as a media watch activist.

Background on Allt är Möjligt

Allt är Möjligt started in 1992 as an informal network of activists. Our targets ware the large billboards of sexualized women that reached the public space in the beginning of the nineties in Sweden.

In 1995 two members were in Beijing and came home with a lot of inspiration. We also had contact with Media Watch Canada and California as we formed our group. In 1995 we started to educate in a small scale.

Today we lecture/educate at least once a week with different audiences both Swedish and international: teachers, students, journalists, photographers, women’s activists groups, means activists groups, and many others. We are also appointed member of the governmental expert group on Pornophication of public space and share our knowledge with political parties that are interested in women and the media as a political area.