1. Globalization, gender and the
media
8th
Nolan conference – University of Helsinki
Dr. Carolina Matos
Lecturer in Media and Sociology
Department of Sociology
City University London
E-mail: Carolina.Matos.1@city.ac.uk

2. Key points
• Situating the research within a wider body of work
• Gender inequality in the 21st
century: advancements and
challenges
• Women and globalization: equality and emancipation
• Intellectual frameworks
• Triangulation methodology
• Gender and party politics
• Gender and media representations
• The case of Latin America and Brazil
• Conclusions and questions for though

3. Parts of Media and politics in Latin
America
• Public communications and regulation in Latin America
• European public service broadcasting revisited
• Journalism for the public interest: the crisis of civic communications and
journalism in Latin America
• Television, entertainment and the public interest
• Audience perceptions of quality programming and the public media
• Television, popular culture and Latin America and Brazilian identity
• Internet for the public interest
• Mediated politics in the 2010 Brazilian elections
• Media democratisation in Latin America: towards a politics for national
development

4. Lines of inquiry
• 1) The correlation between media representation of gender
and patterns of inequality at local and global level.
• 2) The relationship between gender politics (at the state and
intergovernmental level) and the empowerment of the
ordinary woman.
• 3) The role of ICTs for gender development and the
examination of feminist discourses in the media as well as
how they are articulated by female politicians/activists during
campaigns.

5. Developments in closing gender gaps -World
Development Report 2012 – The World Bank
• What have been some of the achievements of the last decades?:
• Gender gaps in primary education have closed in most countries of the
world. In secondary education, these have been reversed in many
countries, including Latin America, the Caribbean and East Asia
• Girls now outperform boys in secondary schools in 45 countries, and
there are more women going to universities than men in 60 countries
• Since the 1980’s, women are living longer than men in all parts of the
world
• Over half a billion women have joined the world’s labour force over
the last 30 years due to the rise in women’s participation in paid work
in most of the developing world
• Growth also of women leaders in politics and government, businesses
and in the other traditional male areas (i.e. media)

6. Persistent patterns of gender inequality*
• Gender disparities have persisted throughout the world, and
include:
• 1) Unequal access to economic opportunities – Women are more
likely than men to work as unpaid family labourers and in the
informal sector, also work in smaller firms as entrepreneurs
• 2) Disparities in girl’s schooling – The lower enrolment for girls in
primary and secondary education is a still a problem in Sub-Saharan
countries and parts of South Asia.
• 3) Excess deaths of girls and women – Females are more likely to die
in many low and middle-income countries than in the richer
countries
• 4) Differences in voice in households and society – In many
countries women have less say over decisions and less control over
resources. They also participate less in formal politics and are
underrepresented in the upper ranks of all sectors of society,
including in business, academic, and governments. (* in World
Development Report, 2012)

7. Women’s oppression and the rise of
female leaders
• Women’s oppression in an age of globalization, international
migration, increasing exchange of cultural flows between First and
Third World countries, economic global recession has acquired a
whole new significance which goes beyond a mere oppression of
women by men in the West.
• Both women and colonies have been seen as having served the very
foundations of industrial development of the key Western nations
(Acosta-Belem and Bose, 1993).
• Rise of female leadership in Latin America:
• Panama elected a woman president in 2003, Mireya Moscoso (1999-
2004), and soon afterwards Chile and Argentina followed by electing
the former president Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) and Cristina
Kirchner (2007), wife of previous president Nestor Kirchner (2003-
2007) and Dilma Rousseff.

8. Women’s rights and the relationship between
economic and political equality
• Philips (1999, 16) sees an important relationship between political
and economic equality
• The author views the pursuit of economic equality as having been
abandoned, whilst there has been a growth in concerns with
political and civil rights and of egalitarianism
• Here political equality is understood not only as the right to
participate in politics, but includes a deeper notion of equal
intrinsic worth; whereas economic equality is understood as the
equality in income, wealth and life-chances.
• Thus political equality is understood in a broader sense, as
encompassing social or cultural equality.
• However, it can be argued that the pursuit of wider economic
equality has returned to global agenda

9. Equality and democracy: why does it matter?*
• From J. S. Mill to Habermas:
• Relationship between democracy, equality, and social inclusion:
• The quality of democratic decision-making depends on sustained
conditions of dialogue, deliberation and talk
• There has also been a rejection of an understanding of political
equality as merely the right to vote
• Notable, the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities
threatens the democratic vitality of democratic decision-making.
• Thus democratic struggle is above all about expanding the space for
the inclusion of a wider citizen body, avoiding exclusions based on
property, gender, race or ethnicity
• * Philips (1999) and Matos (2012)

10. But, after all, are we all equal?: criticisms to the
universal view of citizenship
• Criticisms to universal definitions of citizenship:
• According to scholars like Philips (2010) and Young (1990) , the
problem with looking for a core humanity behind all the differences
of class, gender and so forth leads to equating equality with
sameness, leaving untouched inequalities in power.
• Iris Marion Young in Justice and Difference has argued for the
need to “acknowledge our differences but also to highlight our
similarities as human beings who behave justly to members of all
races.” (in Matos, 2012, 147)
• Defence of affirmative action to correct past historical injustices
and discrimination, or equal opportunities policies

11. The "Third World women“: myths and
stereotypes

12. Triangulation methodology
• The empirical work conducted for this book focuses on mainly the
year of 2014, including some reports of previous years.
• It adopts a mixed methods in order to assess the correlation between
patterns of gender inequality at the national and international level
with images, discourses and representations in the media.
• It examines the main theoretical perspectives on gender and
development, focusing on what has been achieved in the developed
and developing world in the last years.
• Philips (2010) has seen a close relationship between feminism and
multiculturalism. My concern here is with finding both points of
similarity and universality of their condition, as a means of
increasing solidarity and empathy, whilst also recognising difference.
• I have tried to trace a working agenda capable of interlinking the
various layers of oppression and connecting the local, regional and
national with the international.

13. Four key fronts
• My combination of methods has included a focus on four main
fronts.
• 1) The first one has consisted on the analysis, discussion and
reference to policy reports from major international
organisations and NGOs, including the annual 2012-13 report of
UN Women, the 2014 World Survey on Women in development, the
2010 Atlas on Gender and Development – how social norms affect
gender equality in non-OECD countries, the Economic Commission
for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC – Un 2004), the 2012
World Development Report, Brazil’s Ipea’s 2003 study on violence
against women and the 2011 Retrato das Desigualdades de Genero e
Raca (Portrait of Gender and Race Inequality).
• A particular programme evaluation of Brazil’s development
programme, Bolsa Familia, in the context of the debates on the
combatting of the “feminization of poverty” (Chant, 2006) will also
be pursued.

14. The role of the media in development
• 2) A second front will consist of a series of interviews with
journalists, feminists, policy experts, UN and governmental
representatives
• 3) I also conduct here a critical discourse analysis of both media
discourses and campaign material, including both the last months of
the 2014 presidential campaign, and the online discourses
articulated by women candidates, Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff,
as well as a selection of stories in the mainstream press on feminist
issues, mainly from the quality broadsheets and main opinion
forming newspapers Folha de Sao Paulo, Estado de Sao Paulo and
O Globo.
• 4) The analysis of images in advertising and popular culture,
with a focus on politicians who are globally powerful, such as
Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama and Angela Merkel.

15. Triangulation methodology: female politicians
and the media coverage
• These international images of women are contrasted to the
assessment of Brazilian femininity and the discussion of the myths
created around “the Brazilian women” and how this has contributed
to their subordination.
• This has been done through the discourse analysis of images
obtained from women’s magazines of the Editora Abril group,
including the magazines Claudia, Contigo!, Cosmopolitan, Boa
forma, Estilo, Anamaria, Tititi and Women’s Health and which can
be accessed online through the portal MdeMulher.

16. Research questions and aims
• How do questions of gender, race and nation intersect in determining
feminisms in the “Third World”?
• What advancements have been made in regards to gender equality in
the last years?
• Has the election of female leaders throughout the countries resulted
in the reduction of levels of gender inequality?
• Is the media contributing to advance, change, reflect of reinforce
stereotypes and dominant patterns?
• What are some of the images and discussions surrounding the
Brazilian and Latin American women in the media, and how can this
be contrasted to other (colonial) images of Asian and black
femininity, as well as Western?
• How do these myths, stereotypes and perceptions function to inhibit
change?

17. Struggle for women’s rights in Latin
America: a historical overview
• Although traditionally Latin American countries have reserved for women
a subordinate and minor role in politics and the public sphere, the continent
also has a history of vibrant feminist activism.
• 19th
century - As Korrol (1988, 866) noted, in “countries like Cuba, Puerto
Rico and Brazil, movements for the abolition of slavery in the last third of
the 19th
century paralleled attempts to integrate women into expanding
educational structures.”
• Mexico – As early as 1807, the Diario de Mexico supported the rights of
women to an education as a means of contributing towards the state’s
progressive aspirations.
• Dictatorships of the 20th
century: As Acosta-Belen and Base (1993) have
argued, many activists women groups during the 1970s and 1980s were
opposing right-wing dictatorships.
• Women engaged in resistance movements, challenging their subordination,
the enforcement on them of a domestic life and of living up to the
stereotypical image of a “sex object”.

18. Structural inequalities and
advancements
• According to ECLAC, surveys have shown that women’s economic
participation increased significantly in the 1990s, reaching nearly
50%, although it is still low among poor women.
• Women still have higher unemployment rates than men,
• Women’s average labour income is lower than men’s and the gap is
especially pronounced in the case of the most highly qualified.
• Women are also outperforming men in terms of educational
achievements (i.e. political participation).
• The Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (ECLAC – UN 2004) underlined that full equity was
reached in the 1990’s due to access to primary education. These
successes have not necessarily improved women’s position in the
labour market or narrowed the wage gap.

19. Gender and media representations in
Brazil

20. Diversity versus media representations of
the ideal women
• A Voz Popular
• (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqMBr2qrw7c)

21. Brazilian femininity and
stereotypes
• Brazilian women are seen as sex symbols internationally, and in
Brazil, as recent research has shown, a chauvinistic and patriarchal
nuclear family culture still permeates the imaginary collective psyche
• In many ways we can trace colonialist parallels between the
discourses on Brazilian femininity with Asian and Black
• Williamson (1986) has stressed how exoticism served an ideological
function, having had its roots in European colonialism (fascination
with black female sexuality/repulsion of colonial bodies) (in Van
Zoonen, 2000).
• Van Zoonen (2000) analysed some of the myths of femininity of
“Third World” women, underlining the exotic quality attached to
visions of African femininity, and the modest and deferential nature
of Asian women.

22. Images of colonialism

23. Gender and media representation in a comparative
context
• Gill (2007) has argued that feminist media studies has attempted over
the past four decades to better understand the connections between
media representations and images of women with patterns of
inequality, domination and oppression.
• What are the “discourses” about women that have proliferated
in the media?:
• Tuchman’s (1978) conducted an important classic study on how
women were being represented on TV and the press in the US during
the 1950s and 70s.
• The ideal women was pretty and submissive, whereas strong and/or
intelligent women were seen in a negative light. Media were seen as
contributing to limit the horizons of US women.

24. Ipea study: violence against women and measurement
of sexism in Brazilian society
• 3.810 people of both sexes were interviewed in cities within the 5
main regions of the country during May-June 2013
• Respondents were asked to comment on 27 sentences as a means of
assessing their levels of tolerance towards violence
• Controversy: It was initially announced that 65% of Brazilians
supported attacks on women who wore revealing clothes. The
number was later corrected to 25%.
• However, the researchers argued that in spite of the mistake, the
results largely confirmed how sexism is still part of Brazilian culture.
• Conclusions: Large sectors of the population still endorse a vision of
the nuclear patriarchal family, where women are still seen as an
object of desire and ownership
• Only in 2009 did rape cease to be a crime against costumes, to be
one against individual liberty and sexuality.

25. Ipea study: violence against women and sexism
• 54.9% agreed totally or partially with the statement: “some
women are for marrying, some are for sleeping with.”
• 58% agreed (totally/partially) with the statement: “if women knew
how to behave, there would be less rapes”.
• 64% agreed (totally/partially) that the man should be the
breadwinner.
• 79% agreed totally or partially with the idea that “every women
dreams of getting married.”
• 63% agreed that cases of violence against women should be
discussed among family members.
• However, 78% agreed that men should go to prison for hitting their
wives.
• Of 500.000 cases of rape in the country, the estimate is that only
10% of them reach the local authorities. In 2012, there were still
106.000 reported cases of violence against women.

26. Conclusions and questions for thought
• Women have come a long way since gaining political rights and the
vote, but various forms of discrimination and traditional attitudes
persist worldwide
• What are the barriers still for wider gender inequality?
• What can we learn from the experiences of the countries that have
been successful?
• How can we help the countries that have been less?
• How can women change social institutions and attitudes?
• Gender quotas in political parties have helped women advance, but
there are limits
• Female bosses does not directly translate either in more opportunities
for women in the workplace

27. Selected bibliography
• Acosta-Belem, E. and Bose, C. (1993) Researching women in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Boulder: Westview Press
• Buvinic, Mayra and Roza, Vivian (2004) “Women, Politics and Democratic
Prospects in Latin America” for Inter-American Development Bank,
Washington, DC: Sustainable Development Department Technical Paper
Series
• Gill, Rosalind (2007) Gender and the media, London: Polity Press
• Matos, Carolina (2012) Media and politics in Latin America: globalization,
democracy and identity, London: IB Tauris
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2005) “Under Western Eyes…” in Feminist
theory: a reader, Kolmer, Wendy K. and Kouski, F. Bart, N York: McGraw
Hill, 372-379
• Norris, P. et al (1993) Gender and Party Politics, London: Sage Publications
• Phillips, A. (1999) Which Equalities Matter? and Gender and Culture (2010)
• Ramazanoglu, C. (1989) Feminism and the contradictions of oppression
• Weedon, C. (1999) Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference
• Van Zoonen, L. (2000) Feminist Media Studies, London: Sage Publications
•