First came @lineupswithoutmales, an Instagram account that displays festival lineups, minus the men. What is left is probably not worth a $385 ticket. Rather, a strongly worded email questioning why line-ups favour acts made up of straight, white males.
It turns out the Australian media landscape isn’t any better. In a nod to Lines Ups Without Males, @frontpageswithoutmales highlights the grossly imbalanced representation of women in Australian newspapers.
As The Guardian reported in 2012, “male bylines and sexist stereotypes” dominate Britain’s newspapers. Six years later, the situation is just as bad… and Australia also has a lot to answer for.
The Age, 24/04/2018. Blokes, all blokes.
The account carries no mercy, holding outlets such as The Guardian, The Age and the ABC to account.
Each post contains a carousel of three images, ordered as follows:
All stories are removed, leaving only those specifically referencing women.
The second image includes stories not specifically or exclusively about men (i.e. those referring to natural disasters, the environment etc).
The original unedited page, as it appears on the news site.
The discrepancies are startling.
A 2016 report surveyed 6,000 articles from six Australian newspapers. 21 percent of all sources were issued by women, while women writers accounted for only 17 percent of articles published. Likewise, the Global Media Monitoring project measured female representation at 24 percent – across the global media landscape.
Head further down the rabbit hole of female representation and you’ll find headlines dotted with sexist stereotypes, female vulnerability and often humiliating photographs.
A quick browse of this mornings press showed the majority of stories pertaining to Meghan Markle and the royal engagement. Scroll down to the lifestyle tab and we see a stream of female fronted stories on body image, fashion, beauty, celebrities, parenting, recipes…