Gender representation in Australian marketing news
A couple of days ago I saw this press release, titled “Innocean partners with The 100 Percent Project to undertake industry-first research into gender stereotypes in media”.
Basically, Innocean and the 100 percent project are embarking on an 18 month project to explore masculine archetypes in media and uncover how that affects insitutional leadership and cultural norms.
This is a worthy cultural topic that deserves exploration as society moves to reshape how gender is represented in media. I thought, 'what can I do to explore this topic with what I have at my disposal right now?’ (in among my other work, of course)
Marketing Industry News
Having recently completed some modelling of Australian marketing news, this data seemed to be a good place to start, in order to quickly create a robust understanding of the landscape with regards to gendered representation.
These are the main, consistent themes that crop up in articles.
I’m interested in gendered representation broadly while also drilling down on the above highlighted themes. At Critical Truth, the integrity of the data representing such important topics lies at the heart of what we do.
To acheive this, the steps I followed were:
Named Entity Recognition (NER) using a ‘person’ model within paragraph text. This told me every time a ‘person’ was mentioned
Gender prediction based on first names from NER. Every time a person is mentioned, we can predict their most probable gender based on their first name
Set reasonable boundaries for gender prediction; >90% confidence. This allows me to be confident in the gender of mentioned persons.
With that done, we started to do some analysis.
The first step was to see the overall proportion of mentions of either males or females. At this point I also want to mention that gender prediction isn’t perfect, and we can’t account for non-binary persons etc. I apologise for this statistical imperfection.
Gender representation within marketing media
I mean, I somewhat expected this, but it’s still not nice to see. On average, for every three mentions of a male, there is one mention of a female.
The gap is closing though.
We can also take a look at the mentions within a whole article. At what rate did it mention only men, only women, or both?
Females being mentioned in isolation is steady at a little over 10%.
Males being mentioned in isolation has dropped from 50% of articles to around 40%. It is articles mentioning both males and females that is driving that decline.
Gendered mentions across themes
How do the themes that were highlighted earlier impact the ratio of gender mentions?
Nothing significant - the 75/25 split seems to be fairly ubiquitous.
What about if we do this at the article level (both versus unique genders)?
The truth of the matter
Females are most likely to be mentioned in isolation within the ‘social good campaigns and industry efforts’ theme. This includes articles that discuss gender imbalance in the industry, bespoke help for women (e.g. the Aunties), mental health efforts, etc.
We can also see that mutual representation is most likely to occur in campaign launches and radio and podcasts (Kyle and Jacki O, anyone?).
Male only mentions are most likely in digital platforms and martech (Adobe, Salesforce, some news about a new product from an agency, a new ‘AI’ themed company, etc).
How is representation within themes changing, if at all?
There is an increase in female representation within senior appointments, sport publisher partnerships, regulatory news, and localised media campaigns.
Senior appointments are exactly what they sound like, but typically not executive (i.e. they don’t have ‘chief’ in the name). They are more likely to be client side.
Regulatory news is about media bargaining code, ACCC, etc.
Sport publisher partnerships are... for sports media. So, an increased reference to sponsorships of womens sports is influencing this.
Localised media campaigns is heavily influenced by mardi gras, but also often includes OOH campaigns explicitly targeted at womens issues.
The last component I want to explore is whether there is any difference in terminology used within articles and themes that only mention women/men or both.
The places and words to shift the narrative
This is a nuanced topic and we need to be armed with insights into the precise language and placements that are causing differentiation within themes.
Here we will use a process called ‘term frequency, inverse document frequency’ to find terms that are both important and somewhat discrete to gender representation within articles.
I’m showing word clouds as representation of the findings, to spare you bar graphs and statistical tables that not many will understand (this is a blog, not a peer reviewed article). I’m also only going to highlight themes where there is a detectable thematic difference between gendered representation.
Digital platforms and martech
In articles that only mention women, it’s most likely to be focused on ‘women leading tech’.
In articles that only mention males, it’s most likely to be focused on AI or some sort of startup.
In articles that mention both, it’s most likely to be focused on media agencies generally.
Social good campaigns and industry efforts
In articles that mention only women, it’s more likely to be focused on cultural change broadly and reports developed to raise awareness of the need to change culture.
In articles that mention only men, it’s more likely to be focused on Christmas ads or lockdowns… Yeah. Not digging in to that…
If both are mentioned, it’s likely to be focused on the campaigns geared towards a social cause broadly, normally for a client.
Agency News - pitch wins and account movements
In articles that only mention women, it’s most likely to be about PR agencies having won an account
In articles that only mention men, it’s most likely to be about creative agency wins.
In articles that mention both, it’s more likely to be about media agencies and is more likely to mention independent agencies.
Campaign Launches
In articles that only mention women, there are no discernable common/unique factors.
In articles that only mention men, we are more likely to see mentions of the super bowl (go sports team!).
In articles that mention both, we are more likely to see brand work.
Closing thoughts
Clear or shared air?
Women only making up 25% of named mentions is concerning, even if that gap is closing. The gap is being closed by mentions alongside men, not through independent mentions within articles. I can’t offer an opinion here. I welcome some education from people better versed on gender disparity norms as to whether this is a step in the desired direction or if clearer air would be better.
We can see two key areas where women are, with relative isolation, speaking up and trying to drive change. They over-index in individual representation within ‘social good campaigns and industry efforts’. This is the concerned people putting their head above the parapet (like Innocean and 100% club) to challenge the status quo (e.g. non-equal coverage in marketing media…).
Every marketing area needs to look at itself
The gendered skews within agency types is also evident. PR is female dominated, Creative agencies over index (in media mentions) with male representation, and Media agencies seem to have a better balance (especially independents).
We can see an increase in female representation to senior positions, but not at the exec (chief) level. These senior positions are more likely to be client side, so at least there is some positive movement there.
Men are SPORTS. Super bowl. Brilliant.
The tech bros are also very evident in the Digital platforms and martech theme. They are heavy on startups and AI, whereas women are more uniquely represented within efforts like the women leading tech awards.
Here to help
All in all this has been a deflating exercise. Going in to this, I hoped that progress would be more evident in this dataset but, alas, the truth is that gender disparity in industry news is still stark. I offer my support to any of the people trying to fix these clear cultural imbalances.
I also want to caveat that I am highlighting what ‘is’ here. I am not suggesting any blame, fault, or solutions. I am not qualified to do that in this area.
Questions beget questions, and I hope that this will steer said questions toward productive conversations and routes of inquiry.
