Taking Grave Exception....

Ignorance of all the News Fit to Print?

The British government has funded research of somewhat peculiar value, into the habits and proclivities of the genders where consumption of news is concerned. And the female of the species has been found spectacularly wanting. Which is, in a sense, puzzling. After all, what is news, but a type of gossip; passing information from one to another. Granted, gossip is taken to represent news of a more intimate, personal nature, in a limited geography, usually news that does not reflect particularly well on the individual under discussion.

But there are social scientists who hold that the human proclivity to engage in gossip is simply the beginning, fanning out to an extension of news-gathering and -dissemination. And in publishing news on a large scale, we have just enlarged the scope, as it were. The study, now concluded, has come to the understanding that women are curiously lacking in news uptake. In tests to determine the extent to which men imbibe news and become knowledgeable about current events as opposed to women, men win the stakes.

This information-gap by gender is constant whether one is speaking of the United States, Greece, Japan or Australia. Most people of either gender scored low in Colombia as opposed to Norway where such general knowledge tends to score high, yet in all countries tested, men's score of knowledge of current events ranked higher than their female counterparts. Cultural gender equality played no part in this; the evidence was similar whether from Britain or the U.S. or Japan and South Korea.

"The fact that political knowledge gender gaps have not shrunk in advanced industrial nations, despite women's progress in areas such as education and work presents a grim prospect for many developing countries.(?)
"In this cross-national comparative study, we confirmed that women's inferiority in political knowledge is a global phenomenon. This general conclusion can be explained, albeit not fully, by gender-biased hard-news contents in all countries and less exposure to media by women than by men.
"But we also discovered that gender gaps in political knowledge were wider in societies with advanced gender equity than in those with less advanced gender equity. Particularly, men in Canada Australia, Norway, and the U.S. score substantially higher than women."
Report, published in the journal Global Media and Communication

 In Canada, it seems older Canadian men appear more informed than younger men, the trend less evident for Canadian women. The more television news a person watches, evidently, the better informed, except, confoundedly in the United States and Colombia. Nationally, Americans were marginally more informed than Colombians! Norwegian women narrowly beat out Canadian men while Norwegian men scored supremely well.

Women in Canada correctly responded to one-third of questions put to them on current events. Men responded correctly in just short of half the questions. Placing Canadian women on a par with American men, as American women scored dismally; barely one in five questions. "I think it's because public affairs is indeed dominated by men. It may be that there is also patriarchal bias, but whether reality is being distorted or whether it is merely being reflected" is unknown.

"What is clear is that TV news is dominated by men in terms of the sourcing of stories across the world", said Professor James Curran, lead author of the study; professor of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

Seems clear it hadn't occurred to him or his researchers that women are simply resigned to men "messing up the world", and pay them as little heed as possible, preferring to get on with life.

Egad!