What is GMMP?

The Global Media Monitoring Project 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, the International Women's Tribune Centre and Isis International, Manila.

There, hundreds of gender and communication activists called for a one-day study of the media’s news coverage to be undertaken worldwide with the aim of documenting the participation and portrayal of women and men in the world’s news media, creating a research instrument and establishing a benchmark which would serve as a standard for measuring future change.

The first GMMP was held in 1995, the second in 2000, and the third in 2005. Check out the GMMP history.

Global Media Monitoring Project 2005

Since February 2005 the monitoring data flooded in from participating countries. The data analyst group, Media Monitoring Project (MMP) in South Africa finished analysing the results of the media monitoring by summer 2005. Right from the start, the data suggested that very little had changed since the 1995 and 2000 studies. GMMP 2005 was likely to show that the marginalization of women in news media is still very much a reality.

It is for this reason that GMMP 2005, for the first time, included a second – advocacy focused – stage. As a tool for change, the strength of GMMP lies in the fact that it provides hard facts and figures, the staple food of journalists and programme makers. In discussions about what is wrong with, or missing from, the pictures of the world we get from media content, hard data – together with concrete examples – reaches media professionals with an immediacy never achieved by theory or abstract argument.

The second phase of GMMP 2005 was designed to facilitate advocacy campaigns and activities of the GMMP 2005 participants in their national and regional contexts with the ultimate aim of promoting the fair and balanced representation of women and men in the news. The kinds of activities that were undertaken by the GMMP participants depended on each national context but WACC facilitated those activities in various ways.