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Systematic Monitoring of Gender Balance on the News

  • Region National
  • By content Multimedia
  • By coverage Nationwide
  • Type of practice Team practices
Starlight Media

What Has Been Done

StarLightMedia has become the first Ukrainian media company to sign the Women’s Empowerment Principles in October 2019. Ever since, the company annually implements policies aimed at achieving gender equality both as an employer and a media content producer.

Within StarLightMedia, all departments and creative teams working on content declare a commitment to a 50:50 balance in representation. Special attention is paid to this issue in news shows.

How It Was Implemented

The issue of gender representation is regularly raised during the weekly meetings of StarLightMedia CEO Oleksandr Bohutskyi with the news editorial team, which is also composed maintaining a 50:50 balance.

These discussions resulted in the introduction of the company’s own internal audit: monthly monitoring of the number of women and men on the screen. Over the past two years, StarLightMedia news products (Fakty ICTV and Vikna Novyny) have been systematically working on gender balance, recording the figures and analyzing the dynamics.

The company publicly reports the results of this monitoring to civil society, acknowledging both the achievements and the limitations it faces in the process.

Impact

Over the year, 298 women appeared on the air in StarLightMedia’s slots of the United News telethon. They were representatives of government authorities, civil society, experts in various fields, and the military. Despite not yet achieving a 50:50 representation level, at the end of the year, StarLightMedia news ranked first in terms of the number of women on the telethon among all its producers.

As noted by Tymur Levchuk, StarLightMedia’s leader for diversity and inclusion, the company considers this report to be an honest self-assessment tool: it highlights room for development while also celebrating the strengthening of women’s voices on the news.

How Other Media Can Follow:

  • Implement regular internal monitoring of gender representation in content.
  • Raise the issue of balance on the air at the level of management decisions.
  • Report results publicly, acknowledging both accomplishments and limitations.
  • View gender equality as a long-term process, not a one-off campaign.