Thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action, the Nordic summit “Who Makes the News?” revisits gender equality in news media, drawing on GMMP 2025 data to examine progress, stagnation, and the media’s responsibility for more inclusive representation.
On 5 February 2026, researchers, journalists, editors, policymakers, and civil society actors gathered in Copenhagen for the “Who Makes the News?” Nordic summit. As discussions unfolded, the conversation repeatedly returned to a clear trajectory: After thirty years of monitoring, modest but steady early gains in women’s visibility in the news were followed by a long period of stagnation once a basic level of representation had been reached – including in the Nordic region.
The conference built on findings from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2025 and marked 30 years since the Beijing Platform for Action. The headline figure soon became clear: Of people seen, heard, or quoted in news globally, only 26 per cent are women. For the Nordic countries, the concern lies not only in this figure itself, but in the trend behind it. After a period of improvement in the early 2000s, the curves flatten out rather than continuing upward.
“Once the baseline of visibility was achieved, the motivation for fundamental structural change appears to have dissipated”, noted Sarah Macharia, global coordinator of the GMMP.
Who Gets to Be an Expert?
One of the most striking insights to emerge was the way women are positioned within news stories. Across the Nordic region, women are more likely to appear as spokespersons or subjects, but far less likely to be represented as experts, particularly in fields traditionally coded as male: economics, foreign affairs, and security.
In Iceland, for instance, women make up a majority of higher education graduates, yet they constitute only a small fraction of quoted experts in news. This uncovering of role hierarchies within representation became a recurring theme.
Culture and Technology Matters
Beyond the numerical findings, several speakers reflected on how changing cultural and technological conditions are reshaping journalistic practice. Editors, researchers, and civil society actors described how online harassment, organised anti-feminist networks, and polarised public debate increasingly affect both newsroom decisions and the willingness of
During the editors’ panel, concerns were raised about the personal cost of visibility, particularly for younger women journalists and sources, who are often exposed to disproportionate levels of hate and harassment.
In the same panel, Andrea Christiansen from KNR Greenland offered a powerful reflection on how Greenland has become a geopolitical focal point in international media coverage, while the lived experiences of people in Greenland are still treated as background to global strategy.
Looking Forward
As the summit drew to a close, a shared conclusion emerged: Three decades of monitoring have made patterns of inequality unmistakably visible, but data alone has not been enough to change newsroom practices. Several speakers argued that future work must focus more directly on how research connects to editorial routines, leadership, and everyday decision-making.
A shared conclusion across the summit was that three decades of data have clarified the problem, while the challenge now lies in achieving sustained change in newsroom practices.
Ulrika Facht, media analyst at Nordicom, presented the new factsheet “Gender balance and the 25 largest Nordic media companies”. Read the factsheet here.
Resources
- The conference was live-streamed and is available to watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm-3WLEqTMgQyO0oiI14kRIH1maAzK3ba - Read the book Comparing Gender and Media Equality Across the Globe: A Cross-National Study of the Qualities, Causes, and Consequences of Gender Equality in and through the News Media, published by Nordicom in 2020.
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/comparing-gender-and-media-equality-across-globe - Read the book Making Change: Nordic Examples of Working Towards Gender Equality in the Media, published by Nordicom in 2014.
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/making-change - The speech by Andrea Christiansen from KNR Greenland is available to read in its entirety here: https://journalisten.dk/journalisterne-haeldte-mere-benzin-paa-baalet/
- Luba Kassova from AKAS (University of Westminster) has published an essay based on the summit. Read it here: https://lubakassova.substack.com/p/who-the-media-really-serves-and-who