Like to like: how the South China Morning Post meshes gender parity with audience growth

Across global media, women’s voices are under-represented. A task force at SCMP worked to change that through understanding data and re-designing content and products as Laura Warne writes for The Story.

The Global Media Monitoring Project, which tracks gender in news content, found in 2015, that women made up only 24 percent of the people heard, read about, or seen in newspaper, television and radio news. This was only a modest increase from 1995 when coverage by or about women represented just 17 percent of all news.

At the South China Morning Post (SCMP), we are addressing the issue of gender representation through several initiatives.

Within SCMP, we have a 50/50 gender split among senior leadership and across the company’s staff. While this is a significant step, we know it is not enough. Gender balance among staff is only one aspect of achieving gender parity in news organisations. At SCMP, we’ve become increasingly aware that the diversity of our sources and readership can be improved.

A survey of our newsroom provided insight into why reporters often struggle to identify and contact suitable women experts to interview. The issue isn’t that these women aren’t out there, but rather that their profiles may not be prominent as their male counterparts.

They may also hesitate to identify themselves as ‘experts’, and be less confident speaking to the media. Particularly under tight deadlines, reporters too often reach for the most available — often male — contact.

Additionally, while SCMP’s overall audience numbers have grown significantly in recent years, the growth has skewed strongly towards male readers. This imbalance among our readers points to a missed opportunity to engage female readers and produce the content that matters to them.

Looking at the issues of gender diversity across our company and the media industry, a team at our annual hackathon began to brainstorm. China News Editor Natalie Koh and Senior Tech Reporter Zen Soo proposed the goal of increasing representation of women in our news coverage and events and narrowing the gap between our male and female readers.

A taskforce set up to drill into these issues came up with four main action points:

First, we developed new ways to track our readership and sources. Working with SCMP’s Product and Data teams, we created real-time dashboards and reports accessible to individual newsroom teams to track the gender breakdown of their sourcing and readership.

We knew that to change the status quo, we needed to highlight the importance of this data and keep all our reporters aware of the gender balance of our reporting. In creating real-time tracking, we took advice from other news organisations that have implemented similar tools, including the BBC’s 50:50 project, which collects self-reported data on the gender balance of their reporting to effect change across the organisation.

Armed with more data, we began working to improve access to and visibility of women experts in content and events. We launched a nomination form calling for people to nominate themselves or their peers across all industries as potential sources, speakers, or writers. After manually verifying the nominations, we compiled them into an easily-searchable database that our newsroom can use to find relevant contacts quickly and easily. For instance, if a reporter is working on a story about nanotechnology, they can quickly find up-to-date information about women in this field, along with their contact details and biographies.

We also worked to understand the content preferences of women readers and generate targeted content for them. In partnership with our data team, we examined what we knew about our existing readership. We looked at story subjects, geography, key discovery platforms, and audience behaviour to discover what women wanted to see from SCMP.

We found that our most popular sections among women readers included social issues, diplomacy and regional news.

Finally, with a greater understanding of the content popular among women, we began distributing targeted content and building a community. In September 2019 we launched Lunar, a weekly curated newsletter, designed to celebrate women in Asia and share stories that matter.

We’re expanding Lunar through social media and community events to make this a truly interactive and collaborative initiative. Our vision for Lunar is to build an active, engaged community, not just a distribution channel.

As we planned and deployed these initiatives, two elements were critical to our success:

We benefited from the generosity and collaboration of news media around the world. We reached out to other media organisations that were running similar initiatives, learned what had worked for them, and adapted their experiences for our newsroom.

Rather than competing, we recognise that all media organisations are working to improve in this area and that together, we can help each other achieve the larger goal of global parity of gender in media representation.

Similarly, from the beginning these initiatives had the support and engagement of our entire company. We assembled a cross-departmental team with representatives from editorial, product, marketing, strategy, data and events. This cross-department collaboration ensured greater diversity, different perspectives, and swift action at all levels.

While the South China Morning Post still hasn’t reached full gender parity in all aspects of what we do, we’re excited to share these new initiatives as concrete steps for news organisations seeking to increase the prominence of female voices in their reporting.

We hope that through continued collaboration, news organisations around the world can help to build a more equal society that strengthens the voices of women.