ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the current position-complexity of gender balance in the news media industry and explores the status of women journalists in Australia and New Zealand. Both countries are high in many gender equality and human rights global indexes, and have been historically. In the media industry, both countries consistently show a healthy ratio of women in the newsrooms, partly as a result of the internet and other digital technologies increasing the scope for women journalists to report from home or while balancing childcare responsibilities. Unfortunately, this gender balance within the newsroom does not translate to the gender balance of those newsmakers in the media—those quoted or reported on as part of a news story. This perplexing disconnect is in line with a recent global study of 114 countries which showed that despite women holding many top political positions throughout the world, for every woman in a news story there are three men. This gap is less-so in these two southern hemisphere countries, where for every woman there are two men, illustrating that the continuing lack of balance of women news sources is not a simple matter of numbers equaling parity.
