POLITICALLY DISINTERESTED Politically disinterested
Research finds that women know less than men about politics and public affairs. Do they have less time to keep up with the news? Is it a legacy of the past? And does the difference exist in countries with high gender equality? By James Curran and Kaori Hayashi
E
VERY NOW AND again in research, the unexpected happens. You find things that bear no relationship to what you hypothesised in advance, or what you were tracking. It just jumps out from the computer screen. This is what happened to us in an ESRC-funded study of news reporting and public knowledge. We were focusing on how different ways of organising the media affect public knowledge. We hypothesised that public TV reports more hard and international news than commercial TV, and that knowledge of these topics would be greater in countries where public service broadcasting is strong. This is indeed what we found, in line with previous work that one of us had done. But what was also in the data came as a
complete surprise. It showed that in all ten countries, where representative samples of 1,000 adults were asked questions about people and events in the news, men know more about public affairs than women. The ten countries were Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the UK and US. The questions asked varied in terms of ease and difficulty, and took account of differences of news reporting in different parts of the world. They included questions like the level of unemployment in each sample country, and the identity of the Taliban and the Secretary General of the United Nations, with four possible answers (one of which was correct). An unmistakable gender gap in political knowledge emerged that seems to be an international phenomenon. The results of this study were reported around the world, from Colombia and Norway to Japan to Canada, as well as in the UK. But, in retrospect, they should not have been as much a surprise to us, and to the media, as they were. They are consistent with other research which shows that men in western democracies are more interested in politics, and have a greater sense of political efficacy, than women. What gives rise to the inequality of political knowledge between men and women? One possible explanation is that women have less time. Knowledge of public affairs is closely related to the consumption of news. In nine out of the ten countries, women consume less news than men.
22 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2013
The gap between men’s and women’s knowledge of public affairs is higher in Britain than Colombia
Yet surveys indicate women who go out to work also shoulder a disproportionate amount of work in the home. It may be that women just have less time and energy in which to keep abreast of the news. News consumption increases with age. Yet women of child-rearing age increase their news consumption at a later age than men.
“ Women may just have less
time and energy to keep abreast of the news
Another explanation has to do with how the
news is reported. Across the spectrum of media, in all ten countries public affairs news tends to be reported in terms of what men say and do. Overall, women are interviewed or cited in only 30 per cent of TV hard news stories in the ten countries. News is thus reported in a way that
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