Malisa Television Equality Study: Many Eyeglass Wearers – Media

There are still about two men for every woman. Well, not here on planet earth, the ratio is still roughly balanced – but on the screens you can see a parallel universe in which a third of the visible people are women. Otherwise, the television world also has a different composition than the real world – for example, around a quarter of people in Germany have a so-called migration background, but only 11 percent of them are shown in information programs on television. the Morning magazine– and gym-Moderator Dunja Hayali moderated the presentation of the current study Visibility and Diversity of the University of Rostock on Tuesday, and after the public broadcasters were also involved in this study project, she warned that the image of society was written in their “in-house constitution”. .

A lot has happened in some areas – there are many more female characters in fiction, if only the production year 2020 is considered in isolation: 47 percent of the characters are female. This part of the study can be compared well with its predecessor from 2016, which Maria Furtwängler’s Malisa Foundation initiated and published with the University of Rostock. There it was 43 percent – so there is a steady increase in women in fiction, but this also includes all the eager housewives without a double burden that anyone imagines. However, a lot has happened since the first study – the discussions have become more heated since 2016 and the decision-makers, both at broadcasters and at film funding agencies, are still very often male, more sensitive to the topic.

Does it make sense to lump all forms of diversity together?

Strangely enough, it’s the non-fictional content that spoils the editing – for example whenever experts have their say. Rostock professor Elizabeth Prommer directed and presented the study, and she compared her figures with the real proportion in certain occupational groups – in education, medicine and the fashion industry, the proportion of women is extremely high, and that the experts for this are mostly men on the screen is not only to do with a power imbalance within the professional groups. There are certainly more professors than women professors in medicine, but obviously the men remain overrepresented even if it is not the top experts who have their say. In the case of “everyday people” in information programs, for example, the proportion has remained the same since 2016 – 43 percent women have their say, among experts it is only 26 percent, three percent more than four years ago.

Maria Furtwängler founded the Malisa Foundation together with her daughter Elisabeth, and in 2016 a large study on gender roles in film and television was presented. This time, the presentation of the study was actually almost exclusively about television, with not only the four major broadcasting groups participating in the study, but also a number of film subsidies. This time, however, it was not just about gender distribution, but also about migration backgrounds, sexual orientation and the representation of people with visible disabilities on television. The latter, for example, have a share of 0.4 percent on the screens, although it should be five percent – unless you count the people who wear glasses. They actually bring it to 29.3 percent.

Does it make sense to lump all diversity into a single pot, including gender equality? There is then a lot of work to be done and that is not exactly conducive to the focus on individual aspects. When the Malisa study was presented, the journalist Silke Burmester, who recently started the online magazine, spoke up after more than an hour and a half Palais Fluxx publishes “for women from 47” and was actually very interested in the aspect of age distribution – it was mentioned at the beginning, but then, Burmester noted, it never happened again. Even after Burmester’s objection, it was not discussed. Perhaps the people who are asking for a quota should reconsider a topic quota. Recently, the Bundesverband-Schauspiel invited to a discussion event, which also dealt with gender equality and all grounds of discrimination at once, and that the result was a framework in which the target group of Burmester’s magazine did not appear at all, apparently not even noticed by the organizers, but women were only talked about in passing there.

The visualization does not exclude the visualization of always the same clichés

On the other hand, there is far too little room for content-related discussion in all areas. The problems are not the same everywhere. Amazon Studios recently issued inclusion guidelines for the filling of roles, according to which the role and the person performing should be as congruent as possible in terms of origin and sexual orientation. Every homosexual actor should actually go to the barricades – apart from the fact that it is not the point of acting to only take on roles that are particularly similar to you, that would also mean, conversely, that heterosexuals are only played by heterosexuals will.

An actor in a wheelchair, however, will find it very difficult to play someone who is not in a wheelchair – the point is to play roles in which the wheelchair is not the focus of the action. You wish everyone else too, but there are different problems that all deserve their own discussion, because reducing them to one sentence in one big sweep doesn’t help at all.

Above all, however, there is no time to talk about content – for example, whether, as was also surveyed in the study in 2016, women are still more often seen in roles that involve relationships. Here, too, the only attempt to fill the numbers with life came from the audience, from the moderator Raul Krauthausen – he wanted to steer the discussion towards the fact that the mere visualization does not exclude the visualization of the same clichés. A dating show with people with disabilities doesn’t have to be voyeuristic, but it can, and inclusion would be a disservice. What kind of body images dominate, what kind of social behavior, to transfer that to the proportion of women? “Germany’s Next Top Model”, for example, is a show in which women get a lot of screen time. However, what is made visible doesn’t have much to do with equality.