±«Óãtv

The ±«Óãtv held its third ‘50:50 Challenge Month’ in March 2021 – the second to take place during a national lockdown in the UK. For the first time, 50:50 partner organisations were invited to take part.

The data indicates that the representation of women in ±«Óãtv content and across the Global 50:50 Network improving, and that this shift is driving sustainable cultural change within these organisations.

The Challenge

Following the success of the 50:50 Project's previous Challenge Months in 2019 and 2020, the ±«Óãtv's Director-General Tim Davie renewed the 50:50 Challenge for March 2021.

• The first part of the challenge was for as many teams as possible to produce gender-balanced content in March 2021. Of those filed that month, 70% of datasets achieved the target of 50% women contributors.

• The second part of the challenge was for teams to prove that 50:50 can drive meaningful and sustainable culture change. Of the teams involved in the 50:50 Project for three years or more, 100% featured at least 40% women contributors for the first time.

• The third part of the challenge was for more teams across the ±«Óãtv to take part in the initiative, and for those already involved to expand their monitoring beyond gender. By March 2021, 670 teams across all content divisions of the ±«Óãtv were signed up to 50:50 Equality Project, with one-third of those (222) committed to monitoring disability and/or ethnicity.

The 50:50 team was also tasked with furthering its expansion beyond the ±«Óãtv and, for the first time, 50:50 partners were invited to take part in 50:50 Challenge Month. The 50:50 Global Partners network now includes over 100 organisations in 26 countries. Half of those who took part in Challenge Month featured at least 50% women contributors in their content in March 2021.

The Results

Across the project, 70% of 578 ±«Óãtv datasets filed for March 2021 featured 50% women. Only 36% were doing this when they started the project. This is also a 4 percentage point increase on the previous year.

Improvement over time

As evidenced in the 50:50 Project’s 2019 and 2020 reports, teams are more likely to improve the proportion of women in their content the longer they monitor the gender balance of their contributors.

The March 2021 yearly breakdowns show that more teams featured at least 40% women the longer they were involved in the project.

Some 95% of teams monitoring their content for two years or more featured at least 40% women. Of those involved for more than three years, 100% of teams featured at least 40% women.

The Consistency Challenge

The ±«Óãtv also challenged 50:50 teams to maintain equal representation over a longer period of time. For the six months from October 2020 to March 2021, teams were asked to feature 50% women contributors for at least three months and to not drop below 45% women contributors in any other month.

Some 40% of datasets filing monthly data succeeded in the Consistency Challenge. This is an increase from 36% of datasets who were able to achieve the same targets for the period of October 2019 to March 2020, and 18% from October 2018 to March 2019.

Music and Sport Pilots

The 50:50 Challenge in 2020 saw the culmination of the Music pilots, with teams applying 50:50 to monitor the gender of vocal and instrumental artists, composers and conductors featured in music programmes and at live events. These teams, including ±«Óãtv Music Introducing and ±«Óãtv Proms, use 50:50 to encourage increased female representation in the wider music industry.

The success of these pilots saw 63 music datasets take part in the 2021 Challenge. Almost two-thirds (65%) reached 50% women, compared to 10% achieving the target when they first reported. This is an increase of 55 percentage points.

In 2020, 27 new Sport programmes (excluding Sport TV News) began piloting the monitoring of their coverage of sporting events, from Premier League Football to Athletics, and collecting benchmark data. They are working towards equal representation of reporters, commentators, athletes and other contributors. Including the Sport pilot programmes in the overall project results, 67% of 604 datasets featured 50% women. ±«Óãtv Sport teams’ progress will be evidenced in the next Impact Report.

Partners Results

In October 2020, the then 70-strong partner network was invited to join the ±«Óãtv in publishing their March data publicly. They used the 50:50 methodology across a range of different output. This included monitoring promotional materials, social media posts, website content, event panels and the spokespeople put forward for media opportunities.

Overall, 107 datasets from 41 partners were submitted for the first 50:50 partnership challenge in March 2021. Partners submitted data either at a team level or for their organisation’s overall performance. These datasets where then aggregated to give an indicative snapshot of the 50:50 partnership’s gender balance in March compared to when they first joined the project.

The figures submitted by partner organisations suggest that women’s representation across the 50:50 network is increasing. Half of the partners’ datasets reached 50% women contributors, compared to 31% when they first joined the project. More than three-quarters (77%) of the datasets featured at least 40% women, compared to 58% when the partners first started monitoring – up 19 percentage points.

These results will now act as a benchmark for the global network, which will be invited to publish data annually alongside the ±«Óãtv.