There are two research findings that barely made, or were interrogated in, the news when they were released by the Reuters Institute last month: Australian women’s interest in news is increasing, and so is the number of us talking back to it.
According to the Digital News Report released last month, the share of Australian women who say they’re extremely or very interested in news has risen to 43 per cent, a figure that has been climbing since 2023 after years of decline.
The same report showed that this interest is not passive, with more women publicly engaging with the news. The proportion of Australian women commenting on news articles rose from 15 per cent in 2025 to 20 per cent in 2026. This is a significant jump in a short time frame for a group of people that has traditionally been treated differently than men for voicing their opinions online – including by being significantly more likely to be trolled and harassed online than men.
While more women are consuming news and putting their own voices into public conversations about it, our interest won’t hold if the news we are returning to still doesn’t reflect us.
A look at the symbolic annihilation of women in the news media
According to a 2024 analysis of over 200,000 news articles by the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, men were quoted in news reporting more than twice as often as women. Men’s opinions made up almost eight in 10 (or 78 per cent of) quoted sources, and their articles were afforded a higher average word count than the articles published by their female counterparts.
Globally, things don’t get better. According to the Global Media Monitoring Project, women are dismally underrepresented, making up just 26 per cent the people seen, quoted, or talked about in media coverage from all over the world.
That means when journalists need someone to interpret data, explain breaking news, or point to solutions, male voices dominate 74 per cent of these conversations in global media coverage.
And when women do feature in the news, we’re statistically less likely than men to be taken seriously for our work and expertise and more likely to be referred to in the context of our appearance, victimisation, or relationships.
In 1978, sociologist Gaye Tuchman and her colleagues coined the term ‘symbolic annihilation’ to describe the way media erases, trivialises, or punishes groups it doesn’t take seriously.
Tuchman identified three forms: omission (leaving women out entirely), trivialisation (reducing our achievements to our appearance or relationships), and condemnation (branding women who step outside expected roles as aggressive or difficult).
Almost 50 years later, researchers still find all three at work, with female politicians judged on their outfits rather than their policies, and women who voice strong opinions online still branded “hysterical” for doing so.
The news needs to tune into women, but we also need to put ourselves forward
As more Australian women are taking an interest in and joining public conversations about news, news outlets have an important opportunity to ensure that news better reflects women and the ways we experience the world.
Newsrooms have a clear responsibility to broaden who they seek out and quote, consistently rather than as a one-off gesture. Decades of pledges that have barely moved the numbers on women’s media representation make clear this won’t be solved by outlets alone. That doesn’t mean the burden shifts to women — but it does mean we should be wary of waiting for newsrooms to fix the problem before we start showing up.
From my 15 years of working to prepare leaders and advocates for the media spotlight, I’ve seen first-hand how brilliant women wait to be invited into media conversations, assuming someone else is more qualified, or that “the work will speak for itself”.
But the reality is that we can’t keep waiting to be asked. That means learning how the news media works, and pitching ourselves as news sources rather than waiting for opportunities to come to us. Because in the meantime, our work cannot speak for itself. And if we don’t champion it, it will continue to stay hidden when mainstream news institutions that continue to be led by men fail to seek us out.
Of course, we need to hold newsrooms and institutions to account for the structural changes only they can make. And we can keep engaging with and investing in targeted news outlets with a track record for platforming women. But we also need to recognise that the public conversation is shaped by who shows up to it – and those who put themselves forward to be in the right place at the right time.
Right now, women are giving the news a second chance, and increasingly adding our voices to it. If we want that attention to stay and for more women to return to the news, we need to see ourselves more accurately represented in it.