On one day in February 2005, the world's media will come under scrutiny when thousands of people in 100 countries will monitor gender portrayal and representation in the news on television, radio and in newspapers. This third ‘Global Media Monitoring Project’ (GMMP) will be organised by the Women’s Programme of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). WACC is a global, ecumenical organisation which works for human dignity, justice and peace based on the belief that genuine communication is the basis of understanding and co-operation between people’s of different faiths and cultures. The WACC Women’s Programme works for gender justice by supporting women’s use of communication for their own empowerment and for the development of their communities.

GMMP was born out of the 1994 international Bangkok conference on “Women Empowering Communication” organised by WACC in conjunction with two other international women’s networks. There, hundreds of gender and communication activists called for a one-day study of the media’s gender coverage to be undertaken worldwide with the aim of documenting the participation of men and women and gender portrayal in the world’s news media, creating a tested and refined research instrument and establishing a benchmark which would serve as a standard for measuring future change.

The first GMMP, which was organised by the NGO MediaWatch Canada took place on 18 January 1995 when over 15,000 news stories were analysed by hundreds of volunteers in 71 countries. The results were presented in the publication Global Media Monitoring Project: Women’s Participation in the News and were released to great interest at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Five years on, the WACC Women’s Programme co-ordinated a more extensive and qualitative GMMP study. GMMP 2000 aimed not only to assess changes in worldwide representations of women by the media since 1995, but also to improve and build upon the original study by involving more organisations in the research and by making the study more contextual. The actual monitoring day on 1 February 2000 generated tremendous excitement and solidarity among the hundreds of participating groups in 70 countries which generated over 50,000 data records from some 16,000 news stories. As the French monitoring group put it, GMMP “is changing the way we ‘read’ the media… and it will help us to show other journalists how and why things need to change”. Preliminary results of GMMP 2000 were released in time for Beijing +5 events in June 2000 and the final results were published in a book entitled Who Makes the News?, providing an extensive analysis of gender representation and portrayal in the world's news media in the 21st century.

Since their release, the results of GMMP 2000 have been used in a myriad of ways by gender and communication groups around the world and in many ways GMMP has developed a momentum all of its own. From use in academic articles, to providing the methodology for new monitoring projects on advertising or ethnicity, from the grassroots to policy-making circles, GMMP has become a tool for change. For this reason and in response to calls from gender and communication groups worldwide, the WACC Women’s Programme has decided to co-ordinate a third GMMP, to be held in 2005.

With an even larger number of organisations and countries participating, an extensively revised quantitative and qualitative analysis, its own interactive website, and national and regional as well as a global reports, GMMP 2005 is set to be an even more exciting and ambitious global project than ever before. Not only will GMMP 2005 produce an up-to-date research study useful for gender-sensitisation, media literacy, education and training purposes and examine any changes in gender representation and portrayal in the world’s news since the 1995 and 2000 studies, it will also provide a tool for activists to lobby for more gender-sensitive communication policy and media reform.

Described by Margaret Gallagher as 'one of the most extraordinary collective enterprises yet organised within the global women's movement', GMMP is a unique part of the ongoing struggle to promote gender equality in the media.

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