Abstract:

Recognizing the role of the media in the real and active promotion of gender equality has been deemed crucial in fighting for gender justice. For feminist media scholars, the right to equal access to health, education, and political decision-making is as vital for gender equality as the right to access the public sphere, to freely express opinions, and be represented fairly. Ongoing scholarship in journalism is thus concerned with unbalanced representations, gender stereotyping, and dominance of male sources in tandem with worries about the impact of the lack of access of women in decision-making positions, pay inequality, and masculine culture in newsrooms. Also, even though inequality persists in many professional domains, inequality in journalism has deep implications in society, since news media can reproduce or change social norms and values. That is why it is mandatory to discuss the role of gender in journalism university curricula and ask what kind of gender education best serves future professionals (North, 2015).

Even though, in Portugal, questions about how gender shapes news content and production are absent in undergraduate journalism curricula, in the past decades, journalism students at the University of Coimbra have been actively receiving knowledge and skills in this domain through non-formal education. Since the Faculty of Arts and Humanities began to coordinate the Portuguese participation in the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), in 2005, hundreds of journalism students have been involved in the project activities. Known as one of the most significant collective efforts of the global women movement (Gallagher, 2014), GMMP aims to mainstream gender in policies directed at the media, in order to combat gender inequalities and break the norms that support women discrimination.

This paper outlines the students’ experiences and responses to GMMP, focusing the recent initiatives promoted to prepare the 2020 edition of the GMMP. Using an ethnographic approach, and drawing evidence from participant observation, it presents and discusses the success of GMMP activities, making a call to the importance of rethinking the introduction of gender in journalism education formal curricula.

Keywords:

Journalism education, Gender education, GMMP, Non-formal learning.