Gender and media: contributions to communication with a gender perspective from femi- nism and its influence on equality policies Gender and media: contribuciones a una comunicación con perspectiva de género desde el feminismo y su influencia en las políticas de igualdad

Research into communication with a gender perspective arises in the context of Secondwave Feminism in the United States by feminist researchers who identified the sexist content of the media as an obstacle to accessing women’s rights and building more egalitarian societies. This research identifies those female researchers who contributed to the creation of communication studies with a gender perspective through analysis of their publications and evaluation of the influence of these studies on the creation of equality policies in the field of mass media. To this end, about one hundred publications created between 1963 and 1980 were analyzed and the socalled “Women and the media” J point of the Beijing Platform for Action was considered as a reference point in equality and communication policies. The results reveal the relation between Women’s Studies and the origin of the area of communication with a gender perspective, and the relevance of research in this field of study as a driver for generating equality policies and social transformation.


Introduction
Gender Communication studies emerged in the United States in the context of the Second Wave of Feminism, a term that refers to the activism of the women's movement developed between the sixties, seventies, and part of the eighties of the twentieth century (Evans, 1995). The motto of the movement led by radical feminism was "the personal is political", which resulted in a theorization of sex as a social and political category (Millet, [1970] 2010). The incorporation of gender as an analytical category was one of the great contributions of the Second Wave to the social sciences, in addition to the creation of Women's Studies as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge driven by female academics who channeled feminist activism into research (Boxer, 1998). From this field emerged the first research aimed at analyzing the media through a feminist critique by authors from different areas of knowledge. Unlike other fields of research, feminist theory in the academic field has focused from its beginnings on the promotion of women's rights and progress towards more egalitarian societies, so it is pertinent to consider the historical importance of gender communication in equality policies, including those aimed at the recognition of women's rights in the field of communication.

Women's studies, a feminist academics' bid for equality
For centuries, the subordination and infantilization of women was based on a supposed biological incapacity that prevented them from reasoning and thinking autonomously. Although biological determinism had already been rejected by women such as Mary Wollstonecraft ([1792], 2012), it was Simone de Beauvoir who was able to recognize typically feminine behaviors as a social and cultural construct in The Second Sex ([1949], 2011), a work that had a decisive influence on feminist thought. Years later, in 1963, Betty Friedan did the same with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, a work that revealed the "discomfort that has no name" affecting women in the suburbs. A few years later, Friedan would become one of the leaders of the feminist movement after the creation in 1966 of the National Organization of Women (NOW). Unlike other stages, the Second Wave of Feminism directed its struggle to the recognition of social rights, including those related to employment, wages, political participation and sexual and reproductive rights.
The demands of radical feminism were echoed among a new generation of women who, having entered the university, hoped to develop professionally, beyond the exclusive role of mothers and housewives that the previous generation of women had exercised in the postwar period. This is how the feminist movement, present in universities through students and professors, achieved the creation of a new interdisciplinary field of studies that would be known as Women's Studies. The consideration of gender as a transversal category opened a diverse and rich field of research that observes the power relations based on the differences that distinguish the sexes (Scott, 2015: 272) and that allowed, among other aspects, to question the essentialism and ahistoricism of such relations (Lamas, 2015).

Gender Communication, a meeting place for researchers, practitioners, and activists
The incorporation of gender analysis into communication research opened a prolific field of studies characterized by the diversity of topics addressed and methodologies employed (Gill, 2007). The technological development of the media and the evolution of the media industry (Mattelart, 1981) broadened, in general, the focus of attention on mass media and, specifically, from a gender perspective that warned of the harm of discriminatory and sexist content that violated the dignity of women (Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997). The analysis of the media also revealed the distance between the agenda-setting of media companies and the demands of the women's movement. In 1972, Monica Morris published Newspapers and the New Feminists: Black Out As Social Control? an article that highlighted the silencing of the feminist movement and its agenda through scarce news coverage. At the same time, in the late 1970s, UNESCO entrusted Sean MacBride with the creation of a commission to carry out a global diagnosis of the telecommunications and information sector. The results of the commission's work -with the participation of one woman, Canadian Betty Zimmerman -were published in the report One World, Many Voices (1980), which devoted a section to the situation of women and the media under the heading Equal Rights for Women. The report highlighted how the media industry reflected the inequality suffered by women in society and, among other aspects, noted the scant attention paid by mass media to topics that could be of specific interest to them, such as information on the feminist movement or the visibility of women's talent in various fields (162).
The consolidation of women's studies as a field of knowledge and the advance in the recognition of equality from the legal standpoint made the field of gender communication a meeting point for researchers, professionals and activists. The emergence of this field of knowledge in the context of the 1970s evolved in parallel to the agenda of feminist movements that emerged in the 1980s, which were more interested in diversity and identities. It is at this stage that landmark works such as Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1984), which inspired cyberfeminism, or Judith Butler's Gender in Dispute (1990), considered the foundational text of queer feminism, appeared. In another aspect, the challenges posed in the field of gender communication and the evolution of the feminist movement demanded the creation of alliances and the articulation of work networks supported by the possibilities of ICTs, which began to function prior to the Fourth Women's Conference in Beijing and continue to grow stronger today.

Research objectives
This research is framed in the line of feminist historiography at its intersection with communication sciences. While it is true that gender communication studies have a number of referential authors, it is also true that there is a great void and a lack of knowledge about those pioneering authors who contributed to the creation of a new field of research. It is therefore necessary to know and recognize the contributions of female researchers who, from different areas of the social sciences, were interested in the role of the media in the construction of more egalitarian societiesi. But, moreover, the recognition of these researchers' contributions also involves valuing and dimensioning the influence that their work had on social transformation, in this case, through various policies that involved the media in women's access to rights and the construction of more egalitarian societies.
Accordingly, the following objectives are established in the present study: O1. Identify female researchers who contributed to the creation of gender communication studies.
O2. Define and understand the topics addressed in research based on the analysis of scientific publications.
O3. Examine the relevance of the publications based on criteria such as interest in the subject matter addressed, the contribution of the work to gender communication studies and the relationship between research and public actions and/or policies.
O4. To determine the influence of research on gender communication in the development of public policies for equality within the scope of the media.

Methodology
In order to achieve the objectives proposed, an exploratory, quantitative and qualitative methodology was used. In the first part of the study, we took the period of greatest activism within the Second Wave of Feminism in the United States as a reference, which, as a symbolic date, began in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan's seminal work, The Feminine Mystique, and, although it coexisted with other forms of feminism throughout the 1980s, in this study we have set 1980 as the end of the period under analysis, considering this stage as the period of greatest prominence of the forms of feminism linked to the Second Wave.
Access to publications related to gender communication was made through the scientific-academic bibliography search tool Google Scholar, limiting the sample to the period 1963-1980 and using the keywords Gender and Media; Gender and Media Studies; Women mass media; Women representation; Women media portrayed; Lesbians representation; Lesbians portrayed; and Lesbians and Media, which yielded around one hundred results of publications of books, book chapters and articles in scientific journals. Subsequently, a qualitative analysis was carried out in order to select the most relevant publications according to different criteria, among them, the interest of the subject matter (justified by the novelty of the object of study or its relevance for women's rights); the contribution of the work to gender communication studies; and the relationship of the research with actions and/or public policies.
Regarding the link between research with a gender perspective and equality policies, the most comprehensive strategy for the promotion of women's human rights is used as a reference: the Beijing Platform for Action, approved after the Fourth Women's Conference (1995) and which continues to be the global roadmap for the promotion of women's rights and equality policies, especially in the area of communication. This platform of action includes the media as part of the strategies for women's empowerment, participation and decision-making for the first time, and therefore analyzes the measures included in Point J "Women and the media" aimed at research in the field of gender communication.

Gender and media research: a legacy of the Second Wave of Feminism
The analysis of publications on media research with a gender perspective is evidence of the interest that arose in this area of knowledge in the context of the Second Wave of Feminism in the United States. Between 1963 and 1980, we know of the publication of a hundred worksii -most of them publications in scientific journals, but also books and doctoral theses-that focus on the representation of men and women in the media and its effects on audiences. Taking 1963 as the reference date for the emergence of the feminist movement, we observe a concentration in the number of publications between 1972 and 1976, a period in which 40 percent of the papers were published, coinciding, in turn, with the incorporation of gender studies into the academic sphere. From a qualitative point of view, the analysis of the publications identified in this period shows the heterogeneity of the topics addressed from a gender perspective, which can be grouped into research on representation in magazine and television advertising; television series; magazine content aimed at female audiences; content and representation in the press; cinema; and media and programming aimed at children.
Among the most relevant research, the study carried out by Judith Hennessee and Joan Nicholson at the request of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the reference organization of the women's movement in this period, created in 1966 by renowned feminists such as Betty Friedan, was particularly noteworthy. Hennessee and Nicholson conducted research on television advertising in the United States in which 1241 ads were analyzed by 100 NOW members over a year and a half. The monitoring revealed the prevalence of sexist roles in advertising: women were shown as housewives, submissive, unintelligent, dependent on their husbands or as sex objects. Although other research at the time yielded similar data, the interesting thing about this study is that it became the catalyst for the demand for legal action against the media for sexist and discriminatory advertising and content. The research findings were published in 1972 under the title "NOW Says: TV Commercials Insult Women" in the prestigious New York Times Magazine and, in the same article, the New York section of NOW announced the filing of a petition with the Federal Communications Commission in Washington requesting that WABC-TV of New York be taken off the air.
In 1978, one of the references for research in communication with a gender perspective was published: Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, edited by Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels and James Walker Benet. It is in this work that sociologist Gaye Tuchman uses the concept of Symbolic Annihilation to define the absence of images of women in the media beyond traditional roles. The content analysis of television, newspapers and magazines showed how women were largely ignored or represented according to gender stereotypes, as housewives, mothers, or in jobs related to care (pink-collar jobs) (Tuchman, 1978: 150). Other outstanding publications on women and the media include those that introduce the racial perspective, focusing on the analysis of the representation of black women. In 1975, writer and activist Jean Carey Bond published in the prestigious journal of African-American studies Freedomways the article entitled The media image of black women, in which she denounced the underlying sexism and racism in mass media content. Among the interesting results of the article, she highlights how the racial component modifies media narratives regarding female identity: if research on the representation of white women revealed domestic roles and subordination to men, the author warns how black women are represented as a "brake" of "genetically irresponsible" (black) men, carrying out an intersectional analysis that enables us to observe racism and sexism in the media as two sides of the same coin: Attending the matriarchy theme as it is played out in the shows is the suggestion that Black men are genetically irresponsible and mindlessly defiant. Black women are presented as the brakes on a car (Black men are the cars) that would swerve wildly out of control given half a chance (…) The sexist side of the TV idea-man dictates that one sex must prevail over the other. His racism dictates that, in the case of Blacks, it must be the female over the male. Where Black media images are concerned, them, sexism and racism are two side of the same coin (36).

Image 1. Cover of Freedomways, Vol. 15 (1975)
In 1980, Juanita Shepherd published the article The portrayal of black women in the ads of popular magazines in The Western Journal of Black Studies, where she defined the two main stereotypes in the representation of black women: at one extreme, the so-called gifted black -associated with singers like Diana Ross or dancers like Lola Falana-and, at the other extreme, the perpetual mother, symbolizing the self-sacrificing mother dedicated to the care of the family. In contrast, black women were hardly represented as office workers and, even less frequently, as professional executives.
Regarding issues related to lesbian women and the media, the search in the period analyzed yielded only one result: "Personals" advertisements of lesbian women, published by Mary Laner in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1978. The study conducts a content analysis comparing advertisements for heterosexual men and women and for homosexual men and women, concluding that advertising for lesbian women emphasized their positive characteristics.
Other relevant publications are aimed at analyzing the representation of women in the audiovisual industry. In Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, Marjorie Rosen (1973) observes the female archetypes present throughout the history of cinema, while, in 1978, Teresa Hommel takes as an object of analysis the images of women in pornography, identifying this industry as part of the culture of violence.
Coinciding with the end of the period under analysis, in 1980 the journal Women's Studies International Quartely, now Women's Studies International Forum, published the special issue "Women and Media "iii, which included twelve articles that once again highlighted the heterogeneity of topics of interest in relation to the media. Some of them introduce new elements of reflection that will be present since then in the feminist agenda, such as those that, in more current terms, would relate to the appropriation of the demands of the movement. In The 'liberated woman' in television drama, Helen Baehr analyzes the character of a "liberated woman" represented in a television series. According to the author, the contents of this series were the only source of information about the feminist movement for most of the population, however, feminism was "co-opted by the medium and reconstructed into a stereotype of the liberated woman that is emptied of meaning" (29). In the same monograph, Nona Glazer examines the narratives of a popular magazine aimed at a female audience regarding the chores in the domestic sphere performed by working women. Glazer concludes that the magazine only proposes individual solutions that do not question social relations in the public and private spheres, with no consideration of cooperative action or state support.

Gender and communication research in the framework of equality policies.
Research in gender communication has provided diagnoses on the representations and participation of women in the media since the 1970s. However, aside from the undoubted relevance and academic interest of these studies, this research highlights their necessary contribution to promote the generation of equality policies in the field of communication aimed at social transformation.
Since the first half of the 20th century, communication research has highlighted the role of mass media as power devices. However, it was not until 1995 that, for the first time, the role of communication was recognized as part of the strategy for women's empowerment and equality. The Fourth Women's Conference, held in Beijing, involved all the member countries of the United Nations to take up the struggle for women's human rights and enhance their participation in decision-making processes and access to power as a means of achieving equality, development, and peace. Prior to this, thematic meetings were held to prepare for the debates of the international conference, such as the conference on Communication as a source of power for women (Bangkok, 1994), which called for research on communication and gender and the creation of monitoring networks; in the same year, Quito hosted the Regional Meeting on Gender Communication. In 1995, the International Symposium on Women and the Media was held in Canada, where the Platform for Action included recommendations for carrying out diagnoses on the representation of women in the media.
Subsequently, in September 1995, the Beijing Platform for Action was approved, considered the most comprehensive strategy in the struggle for women's human rights and equality. For the first time, the role of the media is positioned as part of the strategic objectives for the empowerment of women and the construction of more egalitarian societies. Point J, entitled "Women and the media", set out two strategic objectives: 1) To increase women's access to and participation in the expression of their ideas and decision-making in and through the media, as well as in new communication technologies (Strategic Objective J.1).
2) Promote a balanced and non-stereotyped image of women in the media (Strategic Objective J.1).
In addition, thirty-one measures aimed at achieving the strategic objectives are included, involving public and private institutions of various kinds, including governments and the media, which demonstrates the comprehensive nature of the strategy. As part of these measures, research plays an important role, as reflected in the following points: 239. b) Encourage research into all aspects of the portrayal of women in the media to identify areas requiring attention and action and to review current media policies with the aim of integrating a gender perspective (Naciones Unidas, 1995: 108).
242. a) Encourage the creation of watchdog groups that can monitor and consult with the media to ensure that women's needs and issues are appropriately reflected (Naciones Unidas, 1995: 110).
243. a) Promote research and the implementation of an information, education and communication strategy aimed at encouraging the presentation of a balanced image of women and girls and the multiple roles they play (Naciones Unidas, 1995: 110).
As part of the strategies related to "Women and the media", the research area has developed one of the most important actions to evaluate the progress of women in the media. This is the Global Media Monitoring Project, led by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) and the participation of working groups involving activists, professionals and researchers from more than 145 countries. Since 1995 and every five years, the teams have been analyzing media news based on different categories disaggregated by gender, including the identification of news subjects, news sources, authorship of the information or participation in the media.
The results of this global research on communication and gender have provided a quantitative diagnosis that warns of the slow progress, if not stagnation, in the commitments and recommendations of point J of the Beijing Platform for Action and, therefore, in women's rights in the field of communication.
In response to the situation, UNESCO responded with the creation of the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (GAMAG) in 2013, a global network involving organizations, researchersiv, communication professionals and activists with the mission of achieving gender equality in and through media and ICTs in all formats and locations and in different forms of ownershipv.

Discussion and conclusions
The analysis of the first scientific publications on communication with a gender perspective offers interesting results for an area of knowledge that could be described as scarcely explored. The most relevant of them all involves the recognition of the work and commitment of dozens of feminist researchers and academics who were able to identify and measure the responsibility of the media in the women's rights agenda. The results make it possible to establish a direct relationship between the incorporation of women's studies in universities and the development of media research with a gender perspective. It is pertinent to remember that, previously, Mass Communication Research was a recognized area of academic research involving prestigious scientific journals, among them, Journalism Quarterly, created in 1924.
However, it was not until the second decade of the seventies that gender communication emerged as an area of research, more because of the interest of gender studies in communication than because of the interest of communication in gender studies. The invisibility of female researchers and their contributions to scientific knowledge is an obstacle for tracing their biography, however, in this paper we have been able to identify some of these profiles -the most relevant ones or those of female professors who are still active-which corroborate the absence of research emerging from communication science, which remained blind to the power relations underlying sexism and discriminatory representations. Most of the scientific contributions to communication and gender studies in the period analyzed came from different areas of knowledge in the social sciences, such as sociology (Laner, Tuchman, Kaplan and Walker); psychology (Marecek, Morris); law (Hommel) and literature (Bond). It was possible to identify some authors linked to communication, but, ironically, they were practicing journalists. They are Judith Hennessee, Joan Nicholson and Joann S. Lublin, who later became editor of The Wall Street Journal and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Only Marion Marzolf, also a journalist, was a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Michigan (O1).
Secondly, through qualitative analysis, it has been possible to identify the topics that aroused the interest of feminist researchers at that time. As mentioned, the focus on the media was consolidated in the midseventies; however, it is pertinent to mention that in the search results there were numerous research studies analyzing the representation of women, including homosexual women, and gender relations in literary works, mainly novels, which could be considered as a product of the popular culture of the time aimed at the female audience.
This analysis locates the origin of problems that continue to be present in gender communication, which leads to several conclusions in this regard. Firstly, the value of the gender category for social science research, which has enabled the observation of the portrayal of women and men as relations of power and domination and, therefore, to focus on the media as spaces of symbolic legitimization of patriarchy. Secondly, important categories for analysis in this field emerge from these works, among them, symbolic annihilation, objectification, or culture of violence in the context of pornography. Thirdly, the research carried out in the 1970s provides a valuable legacy for current research, since it offers references for observing the evolution of the sector in terms of equality. Finally, and as a negative aspect, it is necessary to highlight the scant attention to diversity during this period, which precisely coincides with the criticism that was made of radical feminists at that time, and which led to the emergence of other feminisms during the eighties. As discussed in the results section, it was only possible to identify two publications on the representation of black women in the media, written by black authors and published in African American studies journals. Something similar occurred with publications on homosexuality, which were scarce and written by lesbian women who assumed their sexual identity as a form of vindication and activism (O2, O3).
The last conclusion regarding the analysis of publications connects with the second part of this research and refers to the link between gender research and social transformation. As we have seen, the origin of gender communication is not from the prestigious communication studies in the United States, but from Women's Studies that were developing at that time by academics linked to the feminist movement. Therefore, the driving force of this research was not interest in the media per se, but rather the visibility of sexism and discrimination as obstacles to the advancement of women's rights. The results of the research were used as an argument to promote actions for change. This is the case of the important research of the National Organization of Women, whose results were published in a well-known press magazine as a form of pressure, and not in an academic journal (O4).
Since the 1990s, with the convening of the Beijing preparatory thematic conferences, gender communication has brought together university researchers, media professionals and activists who have worked on different fronts to promote women's rights through communication. Thanks to them the point "Women and the media" was included as part of the Beijing strategy of action, but they are also responsible for the enormous diversity of actions that have arisen since then to advance in its fulfillment. Although it is impossible to mention them all, we would like to highlight the Global Media Monitoring Project; the Global Alliance on Media and Gender, from which a multitude of actions in different areas originate; the Network on Gender, Media and ICTs, Unitwin, linked to UNESCO, which focuses on research, education and participation; the observatories on sexist advertising; the preparation of codes of ethics for the treatment of gender violence in the media; the recognition of new forms of violence against women linked to ICTs; the inclusion of the media in laws on equality and against gender violence, including binding international agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); and, recently,the European Parliament Resolution on the EU strategy for gender equality, are just some of the actions and public policies that involve feminists from different fronts united by the promotion of women's rights through communication. It is not possible to precisely determine the impact of the publications reviewed in the results on the creation of public policies, but it is possible to confirm the coherence and connection between the topics that became the object of study during the period analyzed and the areas to which public policies and actions aimed at promoting equality and women's rights in the field of communication have been directed (O4). Therefore, research on gender communication, at the international level and up to the present day, has been central in the creation of a roadmap towards communication based on equality, respect, and non-discrimination.
The purpose of this research was not to carry out an exhaustive review of gender communication studies during the Second Wave of Feminism, but it was to recognize and value both the work of these pioneering researchers in communication and gender studies, and the influence that the results of their research could have on the construction of more diverse media committed to equality. We believe that their stories are still incomplete and even concealed behind the initial of a name that prevents them from being recognized. Therefore, including the historiography of these researchers as part of the lines of communication and gender studies should be seen as a well-deserved recognition of those who paved the way for today.