THE STORIES OF LIFE
SCREENING GENDER AND QUALITY TELEVISION
By: Bernadette van Dijck, NOS, The Netherlands
”Screening Gender“ is an audiovisual toolkit that aims to broaden programme-making choices and stimulate creative thinking about male and female portrayal on television. It offers up-to-date video material that can be used in many different training situations. The result of a collaborative project between five European broadcasting organizations, “Screening Gender‘ has been co-financed by the European Commission and is supported by the EBU Training Unit. See www.yle.fi/gender.
Why is public service broadcasting so very slow to reflect social change?. The question is prompted by the results of innumerable studies over the years. At the close of the 20th century comparative research in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden found a ratio of 67% men to 33% women appearing in speaking roles on prime-time television1. Despite a widespread belief that ’things have changed‘, detailed analysis shows very little progress in female representation in the media.
How can we explain this phenomenon? But even more important, can we counter it? And why should we counter it? These questions are the point of departure for Screening Gender. The toolkit provides various routes and means of working through the questions with journalists, programme makers, managers and researchers. It is the result of a three-year collaboration between NOS, NRK, SVT, YLE and ZDF – public broadcasters who for a number of years have been particularly concerned with equality issues and gender portrayal.
Screening Gender and Programme Issues
The core of the kit is its video material.This is organised around three basic themes. Who‘s in the picture? contains clips from the recent output of the five participating companies. They illustrate how the abstract research figures translate into real on-screen images – how exclusion is not just a matter of absence, but also a matter of differential treatment. Locations, settings, roles, commentary – all these tell very different stories about the typical television woman, and the typical television man. The wider picture tries to show how television content can be enriched by a more inclusive, gender-sensitive approach. Whether it is in news, current affairs, documentary, drama, sitcom or talk show, we want to demonstrate what can be gained – in both programme quality and audience appeal – by going beyond the traditional formulas and trying something more innovative. This is my picture is straight from the horse‘s mouth: television professionals talk about how an awareness of gender influences their own work, and the difference it can make to both programmes and viewers. Apart from the videos themselves, the toolkit includes back-up material such as trainers‘ instructions, fact sheets and research data.
Screening Gender is a first. We went into the project with a clear aim, but with fairly general ideas about how to achieve it. As we tried out our material – with literally hundreds of programme-makers – we were able to relate these broad concerns about gender portrayal in television to some fundamental programme-making issues. Here are just a few examples.
Talking to the butcher
A press release from the Finnish Ministry of Defense states that the number of female recruits for the army has dropped dramatically. A YLE news reporter picks it up as an item for the evening news. He gets a few statements from the army spokesperson and finds some news archive footage that shows female recruits in training. The result is a fairly typical ninety-second item about women in the army, in which no woman is quoted.
But what happens when a reporter consciously thinks about gender as one of the angles for a news item? In The wider picture we show one example. The news item on women recruits in the Finnish army, which was broadcast in the form just described, was remade by the same reporter. This time it gives a voice to the female army trainees. The reporter is not content to include simply the point of view of ’authority‘ – in this case, the male soldier. He now goes to the people who are at the heart of the story – army women themselves. Their words and actions enliven the item, giving it a quite different feel and texture. The result is a story that is not just more lively and attractive, but that gives more rounded information. We are dealing here with the basics of good programme-making, not with ideological arguments. “It is a matter of quality“, YLE reporter Ari Hakahuhta stresses in an interview for This is my picture. “If you want to make a good story about women in the army, it is essential that you see them moving and acting; and of course you want to hear their side of the story.“
Thinking about gender is one route back to the basics of good journalism. “Talk to the butcher, not the butcher‘s block“ was a favourite saying of the news reporter who taught me the fundamentals of interviewing. In other words you should talk with people, not about people. Easily said, of course. But in the high pressure world of news it is not as easily done. Professional networks mean that it may be simpler to find and interview the official army spokesperson, than to find an articulate female recruit and get permission to interview her. News desk routines tend to result in an over-reliance on white, middle-aged male opinion. This happens too often to be a coincidence. New analysis shows that certain groups – ethnic minorities, refugees, children, senior citizens and women – are more often the object than the subject of news: they are talked about, not with.
Telling the stories of life
When we look back at the last decade of the 20th century, one of the most obvious changes in gender portrayal took place in television drama. Many studies have shown that while men are heavy viewers of action drama, women have traditionally dominated the audience for drama that focuses on relationships and social dilemmas. This is linked to research into patterns of viewer identification. For example, both women and men identify with strong, attractive characters in drama and they tend to look for opportunities to identify with characters of their own gender. Until recently the female viewer has found few such opportunities2. During the 1990s, partly in response to audience research, drama department executives encouraged the creation of strong female characters across a whole range of series – one of the most conspicuous being the crime or police series. In The wider picture we include several examples of this phenomenon. They range from programmes that simply offer a role-switch (the fast-shooting male cop is now a female) to series that present new and more complex female role models. The question here is the extent to which programme genres can be pushed towards true innovation, or whether they merely masquerade as novelty by creating ’new‘ stereotypes. One of the most unusual drama series ’Bella Block‘, comes from ZDF whose Head of Drama Mr. Janke explains its approach in This is my picture: ’We have to tell the stories of life in such a way that it (the programme) brings with it a moment of liberation (for the audience). But it has to grow naturally out of the story‘.
Janke‘s statement reflects well the public service goal of ’stretching‘ the audience through quality programmes, in a non-didactic way. In drama, the approach may need to be elliptical. In other genres it can be more direct. For example SVT‘s Victoria Dyring, host of the children‘s science programme ’Think Tank‘ has a very clear perspective: “I think it is important that we don‘t broadcast old and obsolete standards … That‘s why we want to have at least 50% women in our magazine. We want to give the girls the feeling that they are essential and welcome in this technological world“ (This is my picture). The approach seems to work. Since Dyring took over the programme, its female audience has been growing.
All public service broadcasters ’tell the stories of life‘ – stories that emerge through every programme genre, stories that must appeal to the audience in all its diversity. In Screening Gender we raise questions about whose stories are told, and how they are told. In public television, there is space for all of them.
1 Who Speaks in Television? Oslo: NRK, 1998
2 Who‘s Whose Favourite. Viewer identification with female and male characters in television drama. Hilversum: NOS Gender Portrayal Department, 1995