TV-guest gender gap in Turkey: 90 percent men, 10 percent women

(Image taken from a discussion program on İstanbul Convention)

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The Association for Support of Women Candidates (Ka.Der) has analyzed the TV guests of 13 news channels from July 1, 2020 to January 1, 2021 and tried to find out the distribution of guests by gender.

Focusing specifically on the programs aired on prime time, Ka.Der's report has shown that 90 percent of the guests were men.

No women on the screen

Some highlights from the report are as follows:

* 2,089 news and discussion programs were watched on 13 television channels for 184 days. These channels were A Haber, Bloomberg HT, CNN Türk, Haber Global, Habertürk TV, Halk TV, NTV, Tele 1, TRT Haber, TV24, TVNET, Ulusal Kanal and Ülke TV.

* A total of 6,114 guests attended these programs. While the minimum number of guests was 1 on these programs, the maximum number of guests was 7. 90 percent of the guests were men (5,532) while 10 percent of the guests were women (582).

* While Bloomberg HT hosted the lowest number of women guests with 2 percent, 21 percent of Halk TV's guests were women.

* The average number of guests per program was 2.93. While all of the guests were men in 77 percent of the 2,089 programs, the rate of programs with an equal number of men and women guests was 3.6 percent.

* All of the guests were women in 2 percent of the programs.

* The rate of the programs with an equal number of women and men guests was 7 percent for Tele 1 and Halk TV. This rate was 1 percent in A Haber, Haber Global and CNN Türk news channels.

* Halk TV is the channel with the highest number of women guests with 21 percent. In other words, even in the channel with the highest number of women guests, only one out of every five guests were women.

* Women are disregarded in the political, economic and social commentaries that reach the audiences almost every evening.

'We have formed a pool of women experts'

Commenting on the findings of the report, Ka.Der Chair Nuray Karaoğlu has reiterated that "even on Halk TV, which hosts the highest number of women guests, only one out of every five guests were women."

Karaoğlu has briefly stated the following: "This is an unacceptable result for us, women, who comprise half of this society. While we struggle for equal representation and for 50 percent in every field, primarily at the Parliament, this gap in the media is, of course, saddenning.

"When we share these results with the channels, they either do not hear it or they say that they cannot find women guests. This thought is an expression of the male-dominant mindset, as in the case of the sentence 'We look for women candidates, but have difficulties in finding them.'

"In fact, there are several women specialized in every field such as economy, defense, environment, politics, health, law, communication, education and engineering. If the problem is really the inability to find specialist women, we - as an organization which approaches all political parties and opinions equally - make the following solution offer to close this gap:

"We, as the Ka.Der, have taken action and started preparing lists of women specialists with the contributions of universities and professional organizations. Channels can apply to us for any field when they search for a speaker or commentator. They can benefit from our pool for several esteemed women commentators working as a specialist in every field.

"We are ready to help as the Ka.Der." (EMK/SD)