Women Losing Voice in Portuguese News: Gender Equality Slips a Decade Behind

Portugal's journalism industry faces a troubling reversal in gender equity, with female representation in news coverage plummeting to its lowest level in a decade, according to comprehensive research presented this week at events in Coimbra and Lisbon. The findings carry implications for how the country's media sector reflects—or fails to reflect—the lived reality of half its population.

Women now account for just 24% of all individuals featured in Portugal's daily news cycle, falling below the global average of 26% recorded across 94 participating nations in the 2025 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). This marks a sharp retreat from the 34% representation achieved in 2020, erasing what researchers had described as a decade of steady improvement and returning Portuguese media to levels last seen in 2015.

Why This Matters

• Digital disappointment: Online news platforms, which showed near gender parity in 2020, have reversed course dramatically, abandoning their promise as vehicles for equality.

• Expert voice gap: Female sources are cited at least three times less frequently than their male counterparts, and rarely appear as subject-matter specialists.

• Structural inertia: Despite women comprising 42% of Portugal's journalism workforce, newsroom content and editorial priorities remain overwhelmingly male-focused.

The Digital Media Reversal

Perhaps most striking is the collapse of gender balance in Portugal's digital journalism sector. Rita Basílio Simões, the University of Coimbra professor coordinating the national GMMP study, describes the shift as a broken promise. "Digital platforms were always understood with hope, as a potential route to overcoming entrenched inequalities," she told Lusa news agency. "What stands out clearly in this edition is that this simply hasn't materialized."

In 2020, online news sites demonstrated what researchers termed "almost parity" in their coverage patterns. Five years later, that equilibrium has vanished. The proportion of female sources varies wildly by medium: radio stations feature women in just 18% of source citations, print journalism reaches 21%, digital news sites land at 24%, and television performs marginally better at 30%.

The decline occurs despite the fact that women now represent a substantial minority—approaching half—of Portugal's active journalists. This disconnect reveals what Simões characterizes as a failure of structural transformation. Academic research has long demonstrated that simply increasing the number of female journalists doesn't automatically shift editorial paradigms or challenge ingrained news values.

Where Women Appear—and Where They Don't

The study identifies clear patterns in topic segregation. Female visibility has declined notably in political and economic reporting—the traditional "hard news" beats that shape public discourse and policy debates. Instead, women achieve greater prominence in what researchers label "markedly peripheral subjects": celebrity coverage, arts and culture reporting, and stories explicitly tagged by gender themes such as domestic violence.

This segregation reinforces what the GMMP report calls the "naturalization" of the idea that serious journalism is fundamentally constructed through male presence and male voices. When women do appear as information sources, it's predominantly through their roles as politicians or public figures rather than as technical experts, policy analysts, or industry specialists. Their participation as "producers of meaning, providers of interpretation, and voices of authority" remains severely constrained.

Coverage of gender-based violence topics represents a mere 2% of total news output—a figure Simões cites as emblematic of broader systemic blind spots. The marginalization of such coverage occurs despite Portugal's ongoing struggles with femicide rates and domestic abuse, issues that directly affect thousands of residents and require sustained public attention.

What This Means for Media Consumers

For anyone relying on Portugal-based news outlets for information, these patterns translate to a fundamentally skewed picture of society. Political debates, economic analysis, and expert commentary overwhelmingly channel male perspectives, implicitly suggesting that women lack authority or expertise in these domains. This representation gap doesn't simply reflect existing inequalities—it actively reinforces them by shaping public perceptions of who holds knowledge and whose opinions matter.

The concentration of female visibility in entertainment and "soft" news categories perpetuates outdated assumptions about women's areas of competence and interest. It also means that female readers, viewers, and listeners encounter fewer role models and reference points in fields like finance, technology, governance, and scientific research.

The Newsroom Paradox

The persistence of these imbalances despite women comprising 42% of journalism professionals points to what researchers identify as a structural rather than individual problem. Simões emphasizes that individual journalists function as "mere pawns, without decision-making capacity" within organizational hierarchies. The critical bottleneck sits with editorial management and media ownership structures, where women remain significantly underrepresented in leadership positions.

"We cannot only hold newsrooms accountable," Simões argues, noting that Portugal's media companies "are not predominantly awake to recognizing the importance of promoting more plural newsrooms." This institutional blindness appears particularly acute in the private sector, which dominates the country's media landscape. While state action plans and equality directives gain traction within public broadcasting institutions, they generate minimal impact among privately owned outlets.

International Context and Solutions

The Global Media Monitoring Project, conducted every five years since 1995 by the World Association for Christian Communication, provides the most extensive longitudinal data on gender disparities in news content worldwide. Portugal has participated since 2005, allowing researchers to track trends across two decades.

Other European nations face similar challenges but have implemented various countermeasures. Countries including Iceland, Spain, and France have enacted comprehensive gender equity legislation affecting multiple sectors, including media. Some jurisdictions have established specialized monitoring bodies, implemented quotas for female experts in broadcast media, or created financial incentives tied to diversity metrics.

The latest GMMP data collection occurred on May 6, 2025, capturing a snapshot of typical news coverage across television, radio, print, and digital platforms in 94 countries. Portugal's 24% female representation not only trails the global average but falls below regional benchmarks in Western Europe, where several nations have achieved representation rates above 30%.

Path Forward: Multi-System Intervention

Simões and her research team advocate for what they term "multi-systemic intervention"—a coordinated effort spanning journalists, editorial directors, media ownership boards, journalism education institutions, regulatory agencies, and civil society organizations. This shared responsibility model acknowledges that no single actor can drive transformation alone.

Proposed measures include continuous monitoring initiatives rather than quinquennial snapshots, updated training protocols for journalism students and working professionals, transparent reporting requirements for media organizations, and stronger regulatory frameworks that extend beyond public broadcasters to encompass private outlets.

The report emphasizes that cultural norms persist despite institutional and legislative progress, continuing to shape social perceptions about gender particularly within the Portuguese media field. Breaking these patterns requires sustained attention to how news values are defined, which sources are considered authoritative, and how editorial resource allocation decisions reinforce or challenge existing hierarchies.

For readers and media consumers, the findings suggest a need for critical literacy—recognizing the gaps and imbalances in information sources and actively seeking diverse perspectives. For those within the industry, the data presents an uncomfortable mirror, revealing how professional practices fall short of stated equality commitments despite a generation of policy initiatives and public discourse.