Dear readers,
today is March 8th, International Women's Day.
For exactly 100 years, demonstrations for women's rights, equality and emancipation have been held on March 8th worldwide.
There are lectures and celebrations, rallies and editorials that all have one goal: To remind people once a year that more than half of the population is underrepresented, disadvantaged or even oppressed.
The Corona year was almost a revelation in this regard: It made it clear that women make up the majority in the poorly paid care professions and that they still take on most of the unpaid care and support work in the private sphere.
Women are underrepresented in parliaments, boards of directors, supervisory boards and other bodies and therefore have too little influence on politics, the economy and society.
They are more often at risk of poverty, they are less likely to found a company, and they are more likely to experience violence.
Of the 2,825 billionaires worldwide, only 336 are women.
The list could be extended indefinitely.
All of this is written down every March 8th with a lot of fury, change is demanded and improvement is praised.
On March 9th, everyone goes back to business as usual.
When we at SPIEGEL were thinking about two weeks ago which topics we could set on the occasion of International Women's Day, exactly this discussion arose in the editorial team: Aren't the topics and texts the same every year?
Why is so little changing?
What part do we have in this with our reporting?
Why do we only focus once a year on giving women the space they deserve in our reporting?
On this occasion, we asked our colleagues from the data team to analyze how often we cite, describe and report on men and women in our texts.
For this purpose, they evaluated all texts that appeared between March 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021 in the printed SPIEGEL or in the free area of SPIEGEL.de.
The result is sobering.
In around 40,000 articles, 107,000 men and only 28,000 women are named by name.
In 73 percent of all publications men are mentioned, in only 37 percent women.
In 42 percent of the texts, only men appear as protagonists or experts, in only six percent of all articles are women.
It was clear to us that this relationship would be unbalanced.
But the fact that it is so clearly to the disadvantage of women made us think.
SPIEGEL reports on those in power from politics and business, heads of state and government, and corporate leaders.
We expose grievances in our society and denounce those who do not behave correctly.
We could take it easy for ourselves and say: the powerful and influential, but also those who are responsible for grievances, are mostly male - so we are only depicting the realities.
But that would be too cheap.
Because there have long been enough women politicians, company bosses, scientists, teachers, doctors, historians - that is, women experts in the respective fields.
They are just not always so prominent, do not immediately impose themselves, are not always in the front row.
It is part of our job to discover them.
We have been working for years to increase the proportion of women in the SPIEGEL editorial team.
Because we want to depict the world as it is.
And because different teams achieve better results - that is, better journalism.
We're not on a bad path: 40 percent of the management positions in the SPIEGEL editorial team are now occupied by women.
Now, above all, we must succeed in changing the thought patterns we have learned.
And it works, the BBC has shown it.
Four years ago, the British public service broadcaster started the "50:50" project.
Its goal: to let as many women have their say in all programs and in all contributions as is the reality: 50 percent.
The BBC did it.
We cannot promise here that we will be ready by next March 8th.
But at least we want to try.
So that we don't just write about things that we could have done differently a long time ago.
Your Steffen Klusmann
Icon: The mirror
