The Invisible issue of Silenced Voices by Fleur Santenac

My grandparent’s house. A typical summer day. Like any typical french family, at 8:00PM, we sit comfortably on the couch to watch the “20H”, the news broadcast with the largest audience in France. I began to notice that all the main speakers, the guests, or experts, were men. But the possibility of the underrepresentation of women on television, on our couch at 8:00pm on a Saturday evening, did not seem like such a pressing issue. Back then, I did not realize how wrong I was. 

Spring 2020. In the middle of a global pandemic, political speakers are invited on television sets to be questioned about the situation. 75% of these speakers are men (Politiquemedia, 2020). Over the course of a typical day, men occupy 76% of speech time in french media. 

It is more than important to note that about 93% of French people spend around three hours, every day, watching television (Médiamétrie, 2016). Television is the main stream of information: the willingness to obtain information reflective of reality through television is anchored, and deeply rooted in french culture. And still, 76% of the speech time is occupied by men. 

The issue can be easily reformulated as the news being ‘mansplained’, everyday, to 93% of the french population, who believe television to be an accurate representation of society. Now that sounds more problematic! Before digging deeper into what this signifies for society, let us understand the idea behind ‘mansplaining’. Mansplaining is a term that refers to a situation where a man explains a concept that is potentially already known in a paternalistic or condescending manner. This phenomenon, which boosts men’s confidence by denying women’s knowledge and potential, creates huge biases. 

If the ‘mansplained’ version of the news is the image of the world that all generations get from the media every single day, how could this issue ever be improved upon? Television programs are showing the world that men should be the source of knowledge, the all-knowing, no matter how much women know about the subject. Young girls grow up seeing men rule and explain the world! Not only is the world seen and explained from the male’s perspective, these proportions also promote the idea that women’s words simply do not have as much value as men’s. This has consequences on all generations of women and leads directly to their repression. 

How can these young girls and women be led by example if there are no examples to follow? 

The major issue with the underrepresentation of women in the media is that of the invisibility of the problem. During a Friday night dinner, you might casually ask the question “How many women involved in politics would you say spoke on television and on the radio during the first confinement?”, to which most people will reply “Quite a lot, actually.” (Bastide,

2020). But the reality is shown in the data: ‘quite a lot’ is not enough. Political guests on french television during confinement were composed of 73% males for 27% women (CSA, 2017 report), even though females represent 50% of government members! In terms of experts (in fields such as medicine), women only represent 19% those welcomed on television (The Global Monitoring Project, 2015). 

How could this issue possibly go unseen? Because we do see women on television: either on advertisement or as witnesses, mothers, wifes, playing passive roles in men’s busy lives. Studies have observed the difference in lexical fields, contrasting what is used to characterize a women’s versus a men’s discourse: women in the media "testify", "tell" while men "explain", "indicate" and "affirm". This says it all about the unbalanced valuation of speech, and the deeply rooted sexism invisible to the naked eye. 

What solutions are there, might you ask? Firstly, raising awareness of this issue is fundamental and key to this fight towards equality. This issue of misrepresentation is so deeply rooted that awareness is a major first step. Journalist and author Lauren Bastide writes simply and beautifully about this issue. She explains that other solutions such as quotas could help resolve the issue: no television channel would be penalized, but quantified objectives would be put into place, and the channels reaching whose numbers could be granted subsidies. 

Women empowerment functions in a snowball effect: as one woman empowers another, their voices can be freed. Women are the invisible - yet powerful - voices which must not be silenced. As Hillary Clinton famously said: “Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.”