Gender Equality Policy in the Media Content

Mass media play crucial role in ensuring gender equality. Biased and unprofessional coverage strengthens stereotypes and perpetuates existing disbalances in the roles traditionally attributed to women and men in social life. On the contrary, quality work of a journalist gives the audience a clear picture of how a certain situation has a different impact on people depending on their gender, highlights inequalities and supports search of solution of a number of related issues, from gender-based violence to closure of pay gap between women and men, or creation of equal participation in political life.     

This document contains a sample policy, that can be adopted by editorials or used by individual media professionals as a guidance on how to promote gender equality in the content produced and disseminated for wider audiences. It was developed in partnership with the Commission on Journalism Ethics, a body of self-regulation of journalists and editorial boards in Ukraine, and the NGO “Women in Media” with the assistance provided by the OSCE Extra-budgetary Support Programme for Ukraine (the SPU). The document can be used by any type of the media, regardless of the information dissemination method, in its entirety or as a source of ideas that can be integrated into existing editorial policies.

The effort is part of the project "Strengthening Ability of Media Stakeholders to Apply Media Standards and Promote Media Literacy", implemented by the SPU in partnership with Ministry of Culture and Informational Policy of Ukraine with extrabudgetary financial support from OSCE participating States and partners, full list of donors can be found here.