Blog
This blog collates writing on women and media from across Scotland. If you’ve written a blog and are happy for it to be featured here, or would like to write something specifically for this site, get in touch.
GUEST POST: What role does theatre have to play in the movement for gender equality?
Caitlin Skinner is Artistic Director and CEO of Stellar Quines, an intersectional feminist theatre company based in Scotland.
Stellar Quines create shows and provide opportunities and support for career development, both on stage and backstage, for creatives at all levels. They believe theatre is a force for change, for collaborating with others and building inclusive coalitions.They commission research and join forces with others to campaign for change, and take their work out into the community with projects that nurture creativity and invite action, all with the aim of achieving greater equality.
Find out more about Hack the Patriarchy and all their other work at www.stellarquines.co.uk.
What role does theatre have to play in the movement for gender equality?
In the middle of all that was 2020, Stellar Quines Theatre Company hosted an online version of a discussion event called Hack the Patriarchy. I set up these events as a freelancer in 2019to create spaces for people who work in the performing arts sector to have more meaningful conversations about gender inequality in Scottish theatre. As I watched the tiny squares multiply on my screen I was in awe of the power that was in the Zoom room. Surely if these people want change, we can make it happen?
There has been an unprecedented cry for change from many in the theatre industry in the last two years. There have been a lot of zoom rooms and twitter feeds holding the industry to account and looking at how the closing of theatres might give us the opportunity to come back better.
So I was keen to see how things might feel different when we launched a new series of Hack the Patriarchy events this year. We have done three so far, with another online event to go before our main all day event at the Edinburgh Fringe which will invite women and non-binary people from across the international performing arts community present in the city in August to look at how the patriarchy is effecting us and what action we can take.
And so far I can see, there has been a real change in the conversation. This time it feels like the industry is listening, it knows it needs to change to survive. That wasn’t the case when we had our first event back in 2019.
But there is a frustration and fatigue with the pace of change, with perceived tokenism and with the feeling that as long as the overall structures don’t change (hello capitalism, hello diminishing government subsidy for the arts) there’s not much that is going to get done. I’ve also heard people express a nervousness in coming to a discussion on feminism because they don’t feel up to date, that they might not have the ‘right’ opinion on an issue or use the ‘correct’ language.
I feel strongly that we can’t let this moment pass despite the frustration and fatigue and that we need to include everyone So, I am asking myself, what can we do about gender inequality in the performing arts but also what role does the performing arts have to play in the movement more broadly?
GUEST POST: “Warning” versus “claiming”: the subtle misogyny in media discourse
This blog is part of a series of posts by student placements from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course that Engender hosted in Spring 2022. We wanted to share Kirsty Rorrison's valuable research here on the GEMS site too.
Kirsty's final post continues research into gender bias in political news reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, she discusses how male and female politicians are quoted and referenced in the media, and how this language plays into wider patriarchal society.
For my third and final blog post, I want to discuss what my research found about female politicians and their news coverage relating to the pandemic. In my last post, I discussed my findings on journalism and COVID-19 in a more general sense; I showed that the topics reported on and who was writing about them seemed heavily linked with patriarchal gender norms. Now, I want to consider what I learned about women in politics based on their representations in news coverage of the pandemic.
GUEST POST: Who says what? A breakdown of gender bias in news topics and reporting
This blog is part of a series of posts by student placements from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course that Engender hosted in Spring 2022. We wanted to share Kirsty Rorrison's valuable research here on the GEMS site too.
In the second of three posts, Kirsty Rorrison continues research into gender bias in political news reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, she looks specifically at the breakdown of bias in topics and authors, as well as whose voices are missing in the reporting of the pandemic.
As my placement with Engender is nearing its end, I have finally completed my research on gender, COVID-19 and media. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss what I found out in my investigation and why it was crucial that I delved a bit deeper into this topic. As I mentioned in my previous post, my main area of interest in this research has always been the ways in which women in politics are represented. However, I also wanted to look at how other women, and more broadly gender, appeared in news coverage of coronavirus. For this research, I ended up coding 108 news stories. I took note of the topic, the gender of the journalist, and the identity markers of every person mentioned in each article. I wanted to see where gender appeared in news coverage, whether this related to the kinds of topics being discussed, the journalists who wrote about them or the people mentioned in articles. In this blog post, I will outline what my analysis revealed about journalists and news topics - in other words, who is writing, and what are they writing about?
Has it happened to you?
by Professor Karen Boyle at the University of Strathclyde.
[CN: This blog contains mentions of sexual abuse and harassment]
At the end of April, as Westminster misogyny again reared its ugly head, I was invited on Nicky Campbell’s phone-in on Radio 5 Live, alongside Dr Charlotte Proudman (a feminist barrister and academic) and Nicky Clark (founder of the Act Your Age campaign). In case you’ve lost track of which Westminster-misogyny story happened when, the context was the Mail on Sunday story in which an anonymous Tory MP accused Angela Rayner of using her legs – like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct - to distract the Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s Questions.
There are many excellent responses to this story that explore the wider sexist culture which enabled it. I’m not going to rehash these arguments. Rather I want to reflect on a question Nicky Campbell asked Dr Proudman: did she have any similar experiences to share?
GUEST POST: Precedented inequalities in unprecedented times
![Graphic with quote by Kirsty Rorrison that reads: Stereotypical gender roles and wider social structures inform the ways in which they [women] are represented, scrutinised, and even obscured - this can be even more complicated for women who experience oppressions due to their race, sexuality, or other identities.](siteimages/blog/resized/gems-blog-square-kirsty-rorrison-blog-1-400.png)
This blog is part of a series of posts by student placements from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course that Engender hosted in Spring 2022. We wanted to share Kirsty Rorrison's valuable research here on the GEMS site too.
In this post, Kirsty introduces research into how gender bias in political news reporting has operated during the Covid-19 pandemic, and here discusses the impact the pandemic has had on women and minoritised communities, as well as it's wider representation in the media.
With the COVID-19 pandemic recently passing its two year anniversary, I’m sure many of us have been reflecting on the ways in which life has changed since the coronavirus first became a mainstream issue. We have all been impacted by the pandemic in one way or another - circumstances have changed personally, socially, politically and economically all across the world. However, while it may seem like everything in our society has fundamentally shifted, its underlying social structures have remained practically untouched. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as something of a magnifying glass for the oppressive social institutions forming the bedrock of modern society. In these "unprecedented times,” some things have reflected the precedent more than ever.
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