Cristiana Bedei is an Italian digital journalist and arts writer based in London, UK. Her work has been focusing on gender issues and female artists. She graduated from the University of Siena, Italy, in Art History, and temporarily relocated to Paris where she met with the Guggenheims to finalise her thesis about artist Pegeen Vail. She moved to London in 2010, and after working as a press officer and artist assistant, she is currently finishing an MA in Digital Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Advances in technology will cause a loss of more than 7 million jobs in the world’s biggest economies within the next five years, according to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report released to coincide with its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. And because of their low participation in computer and engineering-related fields, women are expected to lose out the most.
Of the accredited reporters at Davos, 39% are women; of the “media leaders”—the senior editorial staff and owners—the figure is 25%, a number that seems to confirm that women are more underrepresented as we climb up the editorial ranks.
Chicas Poderosas is a project aiming to train Latin American female journalists to become digital and tech-savvy leaders in their newsroom.
Special focus: Women at War. A “Women in Journalism” talk discussed the differences gender roles create in reporting on foreign conflict. But mind you, there is no such thing as a softer side of war.
No longer simple online diaries, blogs offer a platform for women to find their voices as experts and opinion-makers. LONDON, U.K—The media environment is mostly male-dominated. News is written by men and about men, and female journalists, experts and sources remain underrepresented. Data show how media organizations—in the U.K. and the Western world generally—perpetrate a systematic marginalization of women, and an increasing number of them have turned to the digital sphere to claim a public space through personal channels, social media and blogs. Blogging has often been praised for validating female voices, allowing them unprecedented freedom to publish original and unfiltered content, regardless of mainstream agendas and focuses.