Gaps in media and communication governance: towards a gender-aware research and advocacy agenda

Gender aware communication scholarship has been slow to engage with the domain of media and communication policy: though preoccupations about women’s equal access to media content, employment and decision-making, about their fair representation in the media and about the constraints to women’s communication rights in the evolving digital context are clearly dependent on policy determinations, the broader policy context of gender inequalities in the media has seldom been investigated. The situation is gradually changing, with contributions exploring different aspects of the policy dimensions characterising the nexus between gender and media (Jorge, 2000; Jensen, 2005; Sarikakis and Shade, 2008; Sarikakis and Nguyen, 2009; Gallagher, 2011, 2014; Byerly, 2011; Padovani and Pavan, 2013; EIGE, 2013). Yet much remains to be done in terms of conceptual clarification, the elaboration of analytical frameworks adequately grounded in feminist theory, efforts to reduce existing fragmentation in research programmes, the conduct of cross-cultural and comparative investigations.