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New research from Simon Fraser University shows that women s voices continue to be underrepresented in the media, despite having prominent female leaders across Canada and internationally. Researchers in SFU s Discourse Processing Lab found that men outnumber women quoted in Canadian news media about three to one. The findings from the team s Gender Gap Tracker study were published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.
The research team collected data from seven major Canadian media outlets from October 2018 to September 2020. Over the two-year period, 29 per cent of people quoted in media stories were women versus 71 per cent men. B.C. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, quoted more than 2,200 times, notably topped the list for women most quoted in the news many others were also public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic but still had fewer quotes than the top three male voices, all politicians.
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In mid-January Brooks Fallis, MD, was relieved of his duties as interim medical director of critical care at William Osler Health System in Canada s Ontario province. Fallis had publicly criticized the provincial government s response to the pandemic, most recently to the new coronavirus variants.
Fallis said he was stripped of his directorship because the government pressured Osler administrators and because he did not warn them about all his media appearances. Officials with Osler and the provincial government, however, denied his claims.
Then on Friday, Ontario issued a six-point plan to address the variants, echoing some of Fallis s points.