Launched by the Osservatorio di Pavia Media Research in 2011 and structured according to the model of the Global Media Monitoring Project, the European Observatory on gender Representation has now reached its 5^th edition. While waiting for the 2015 findings, the Osservatorio has just published the results relating to the 2014 monitoring.

Focused on the newscasts of the two main TV channels of 5 European countries – France, Germany, England, Italy and Spain – the research provided a pretty discouraging overview of the situation: European TV news, indeed, continue to depict a mostly male world, where women are only 29% out of 4.930 people appearing in the news. Of all the monitored countries, Spain and France still occupy the top of the chart, moving respectively from 36% to 34% and from 33% to 31%, while Germany maintained the same percentage of women presence in the news registered in 2013 (29%) and England went down to 25%. Italy is left behind, with 24% of women in the news, although the Italian newscasts have the highest number of female journalists.

Four years after the launch of the OERG, these findings confirm therefore a clear difficulty of the European news media to guarantee a proportional presence of women: a step backwards compared to the results emerged from the same research carried out in 2013, which had showed a surprising increase of women’s presence in the news, with an active role either as journalists and as the main subjects of news stories.