Addressing the gender imbalance in property journalism

Property Reporter is committed to fair and accurate reporting - and, as our parent company, Barcadia Media, is a signatory of the Women in Finance Charter, we are keen to ensure that this is not only true for the content of our stories, but also who we represent.

Related topics:  Business
Editorial Team
11th November 2019
Gender Balance 363

Our sister site, Financial Reporter, ran a piece in April detailing how it planned to improve the representation of women in its reporting, inspired by similar efforts by the BBC and The Atlantic. Similarly, while we are committed to using the best sources and commentators in the industry - regardless of gender - we don’t receive as many comments from female experts on some of the biggest topics that we cover. This is something we are committed to changing in coming months, and we hope that it will make Property Reporter a better, more balanced publication - by properly representing the many women who work in the property industry.

Interestingly, it seems that property is an industry which is not quite as male-dominated as that of our financial services counterparts.

Despite this, our inbox is still dominated by comments, interview requests, blogs, and feature pieces from men - with just 10% coming from women in the least-balanced weeks we analysed. This is clearly not representative of the people working in our industry, or of society as a whole - which is precisely why we are committed to improving our gender representation on Property Reporter.

So that we can measure our progress, we’ve spent time measuring the balance of male and female comments, features and blogs we received and published in recent months, and we will be working with the many excellent PR agencies and in-house press officers we deal with on a daily basis to help improve our reporting.

We are part of a group of publications who support gender equality at industry level (and beyond) - the hugely successful Financial Reporter Women’s Recognition Awards has been a great starting point for conversations in financial services, and Financial Reporter has seen a dramatic improvement since it began actively working to balance its reporting.

We’re proud of the work done so far, and our aim is to ensure that everybody - regardless of gender - is represented in our reporting. We look forward to sharing updates with you as we go (and, if you’re a press officer who’d like to help us achieve our goals, get in touch!).

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