Interested in the facts when it comes to women and visibility?
Here are a few key statistics:
- Female actors get far fewer speaking roles than male actors (approximately one third are awarded to women).
- Female journalists get fewer bylines than male journalists (for Australian statistics click here and for US statistics click here).
- Our art is featured on fewer gallery walls. The National Gallery in the UK is probably the most stark example where in 2011 it held 2,300 pieces of art in its collection, of which only 10 were by women.
- Our stories don’t fill anywhere near as many history books.
- We receive less pay than men. (And this trend is being perpetuated even in new industries. In 2016 for example, female bloggers earned only 60% of the profit that male bloggers did.)
- Female sports stars receive far less television coverage than men (approximately 7% of total coverage in Australia).
- There are less of us on the boards of fortune 500 companies (31% of board seats are occupied by women) and we’re wildly under-represented in parliaments around the world (currently 24% globally).
- Violence against us is minimised or overlooked, or in the worst instances, encouraged.
- And our opinions about our own bodies – how they should be portrayed, how they should be cared for during and after pregnancy, how we should manage our reproductive systems – are given less weight and less coverage than the opinions of cisgendered men who will never even know what it is to have a female body.
