The impact of journalism routines,practices and values on women experts’ media work

Abstract

Experts are an increasingly common feature of contemporary journalism but this influential category of news source is dominated by men. Evidence suggests this is not attributable to the limited pool of women experts but journalists’ entrenched ideas about the most suitable news sources, societal stereotypes about the gendered nature of expertise, and women experts’ own reticence. This article draws on in-depth interviews with 52 women experts from New Zealand universities to explore how they perceive journalism routines, practices and values impact their media work. Time factors, conflict framing, the hierarchy of news values, and journalists’ reliance on a small group of sources are key themes shaping women’s experiences. Women experts have a good understanding of how the news media work but struggle to interest journalists in angles related to gender, feminism and women’s work. Efforts to improve the representation of women sources in news must go beyond training and support to also consider the gender logics of contemporary news production and content.

Introduction

Studies consistently point to the under-representation of women in all categories of news source in mainstream media. The long running Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) indicates that around the world, women comprise just 25% of all news sources and subjects, with a glacial rate of improvement over the past 30 years and then, mostly in those “unexceptional” categories of source who provide personal experience or represent popular opinion (Macharia, 2021: 5). Despite academic and other expert news sources becoming increasingly common in the news (e.g. Albaek, 2011; Cukier et al., 2019), to the point that they “enjoy considerable discursive power in Western democracies”, women have not been equal beneficiaries of this trend and consequently lack equal access to the “actual and symbolic power” associated with a public voice (Niemi and Pitkänen, 2017: 355, 356). Still, as Niemi and Pitkänen note, “it is surprising how often gender is…excluded from the research framework” (357) around sources and source practices.

In an effort to add to the small body of scholarly work about women experts in the news, this study uses in-depth qualitative interviews to generate rich, thick data (Miles et al., 2020) about women experts’ media experiences in Aotearoa NZ (NZ). It is not a comparative study but is instead designed to focus on how women experts make sense of their media work inside a journalistic system long established as gendered (Kassova, 2020; Ross and Carter, 2011). Only a handful of studies have concentrated on women experts’ experiences with media work, in an effort to better understand their motivations, challenges and barriers and help address the entrenched inequalities in source selection and use that undermine news organisations’ claims of impartiality and trustworthiness (Cukier et al., 2019; Vandenberghe et al., 2020). NZ offers a useful site for this analysis given it is a socially progressive country which performs well in international measures of gender equality and has a female dominated journalistic workforce (Fountaine et al., 2021), while simultaneously under-representing women experts (Macharia et al., 2025). The expert news source is thus an underexamined bellwether of gender equality in NZ journalism, and the experiences of women experts here have something important to offer our wider understanding of the gendering of news and in particular the journalistic practices and norms that women experts perceive shape their interactions with media work.

Expert women sources in the news

Thirty years of data from the GMMP provide clear evidence of the continued under-representation of women as news subjects and sources, with only slow improvement in the more influential categories of news source such as spokesperson and expert. The 2025 GMMP (Macharia et al., 2025) shows women comprise just 23% of experts quoted or cited in the world’s legacy news outlets, down slightly from a high of 24% in 2020, and in contrast to their increased presence as providers of popular opinion (45%; 38% in 2020) and personal experience (42% in 2025 and 2020). Academic studies examining the gendered nature of journalistic expertise concur that women typically comprise 20–30% of expert news sources with racialised minority women faring much worse (less than 5% in Cukier et al., 2019), including in countries where women’s high rates of participation in education, politics and the professions might reasonably create conditions for better equality (Niemi and Pitkänen, 2017).

The hypothesis that women experts are under-represented in the news because they lack requisite levels of professional presence and seniority is not well supported by this literature though “the limited ‘pool’ is an oft-cited excuse to justify the exclusion of women or other underrepresented groups” (Cukier et al., 2019: 39; see also Macharia et al., 2025). Vandenberghe et al. argue that the practical barriers to more diverse source use identified by Flemish journalists (such as too few experts from ethnic minority backgrounds) “can be seen as a convenient fiction…used to justify their networks’ highly mainstream makeup” (2020: 240). As Howell and Singer (2019) demonstrate in their media analysis, while male experts likely outnumber female experts in Britain by just over 2:1, the broadcast ratio is approximately 4.4:1. Similarly, a US study from the Covid-19 pandemic period shows that despite women being at the forefront of vaccine development and administration, men still comprised two thirds of quoted research and medical experts in the New York Times – an especially problematic finding given that outlet’s well publicised efforts to better report the voices of women experts (Hubner, 2023). In contrast, Wien (2014) argues that her finding that men comprise 80% of academic experts quoted in Danish newspapers accurately reflects the gender composition of that nation’s university faculty.

Drawing from surveys and interviews with journalists and women experts, Howell and Singer (2019: 1019) suggest two more instructive explanations for women experts’ under-representation in news: journalists have entrenched ideas about the best people to use as sources, shaped by newsroom’s routine reliance on the “usual suspects” and societal stereotypes about the gendered nature of expertise, and women experts are concerned about looking too “pushy” and “may feel a greater need than men to be pursued and persuaded”. Albaek (2011: 340) applied the psychological concept of the Matthew effect to this first, well-established feature of journalism where “researchers who have been used extensively by journalists in the past are simply used further”. While his analysis did not employ a gendered lens, subsequent studies have confirmed journalists’ conflation of maleness with expertise. Preconceptions about suitable news sources were common among the Finnish journalists interviewed by Niemi and Pitkänen (2017), whose survey data indicated male academics were more frequently contacted by journalists regardless of seniority and willingness to cooperate with media. Women academics reported similar levels of willingness to take on the role of expert and readiness to be interviewed but made up less than 30% of interviewed experts in that country’s television news and newspapers. Niemi and Pitkänen foreground the ways that journalistic practices enable the continuation of “a masculine tradition of public expertise” (2017: 355), with journalists generally downplaying gender as a factor in source selection, instead referring to the need to find the “best” expert, and justifying a limited range of sources on the basis of time pressures and perceptions that “men hold the majority of positions of expertise in society” (365). Finnish journalists did not, however, appear to share the view of their British counterparts that women experts are “difficult to negotiate with” and require “time-consuming reassurance” (Howell and Singer: 1022).

In one of the few studies to interview expert news sources, Shine (2021: 2371) captured high levels of willingness to engage with media among the 30 Australian women academics in her study: “almost all…were willing to provide comments to journalists for news stories, though their reasons for doing so varied”, for example, from obligation to a desire to contribute. Despite this willingness most participants had also had negative media encounters and experienced apprehension, nerves and self-doubt, with “a reluctance to be ‘on camera’…prevalent across the group” (2372). Aided by a research design focused solely on women’s experiences, Shine identified four factors influencing female researchers’ attitudes towards news media engagement: obligation, lack of confidence, caution and time. In a subsequent comparative study of male and female experts and spokespeople, women were no less willing than men to engage in media interviews, with both genders reporting lower levels of willingness to interview with commercial television and higher levels for pre-recorded interviews (Shine et al., 2024). Howell and Singer’s (2019: 1021) survey of female experts who took part in BBC Academy training days (an initiative to increase use of women sources in British broadcasting) also found high levels of “general willingness to appear on air” but with an accompanying and considerable hesitance to “actually put themselves or their qualifications forward”, linked to concern about coming across as unqualified, unprepared, overconfident or pushy.

There is some evidence that journalists who become aware of the ways in which their professional practices contribute to women’s underrepresentation make increased efforts to find and use women sources (e.g. Taub and Fisher, 2018) but also studies suggesting some journalists resist diversity as incompatible with newswork and social equality (Vandenberghe et al., 2020) and see feminism as a compromise of journalistic integrity (North, 2009). Numerous studies and reports have recommended changes to journalistic practices to help achieve gender parity. Kassova’s (2020: 29) report into the under-representation of women in news media includes three pages of recommendations including tackling the industry’s “gender blindness” through initiatives such as “comprehensive gender-sensitivity training…for men and women…along the whole news value chain” (see also Carter, 2015; Macharia, 2021; Macharia et al., 2025). Shine (2021) suggests journalists acknowledge women’s common areas of concern and adapt their approach and interview practices to provide more detail about the nature of the interview, time commitments and likely questions. Similarly, Howell and Singer argue journalists need to take women’s likely reservations into account, “recognising that the time taken to persuade a highly qualified female expert to appear on air is time well spent” (2019: 1022). Doing so, they say, will both increase women’s confidence and erode the narrative that communicating expertise is a predominantly male endeavour – a narrative which is itself underpinned by structural biases and sexism (Taub and Fisher, 2018).

The gendered nature of news production

The conceptual framework of my overall study centres around women academic experts’ experiences with media work, and the social, structural and individual level factors which they perceive influence their encounters with journalists and motivations to engage with news media. This article focuses on the organisational structures of journalism, specifically the routines, practices and values which women experts see as shaping their experiences, through a gendered lens informed by feminist critique of the implicitly masculine nature of news and news production.

Since the 1970s, research has documented the “symbolic annihilation” of women by mainstream media, including news (Ross and Carter, 2011). This combination of omission, trivialisation and condemnation has changed form over the past 50 years (e.g. De Bruin, 2000; North, 2009) and some improvements have occurred, particularly in the journalistic workforce, but gender equality remains elusive (Macharia et al., 2025; Ross and Carter, 2011). As Macharia et al. (2025: 33) observe, the news media “has learnt to incorporate women’s voices without redistributing authority”, a pattern which has focused feminist researchers’ attention on the social influences and structural practices which continue to privilege male perspectives in story production while not appearing to be gendered: “the implicitly ‘masculine’ norms and values of journalistic practice masquerade as professional routines to which all journalists are expected to subscribe…mak[ing] them difficult to identify as gendered and therefore difficult to challenge” (Ross and Carter: 1149; see also Alcantara and Simões, 2025; De Bruin, 2000; Pajnik and Hrženjak, 2022 on the myth of gender equality in journalism). For example, masculine norms underpin the hierarchy of news values which positions sports, business and politics as highly newsworthy (North, 2009; Toff and Palmer, 2019) while virtually ignoring topics which affect many women, such as gender-based violence (Macharia et al., 2025). Further, male sources are conflated with public and professional life and females with the private and personal (Macharia et al., 2025; Ross and Carter, 2011), and conflict, competition and aggression are embedded in news story structures and language (Chambers et al., 2004; Toff and Palmer, 2019). At the same time, feminism and feminist sources tend to be disparaged and resisted in the newsroom, affirming traditional gender norms and limiting meaningful exploration of alternative perspectives (North, 2009).

These patterns in news production have serious consequences, particularly in times of political and economic uncertainty. Sidelining women’s specialised knowledge (Macharia et al., 2025) and diminishing women’s democratic participation (Haraldsson and Wängnerud, 2018; Ross and Carter, 2011) arguably undermines journalism’s ability to support meaningful public debate about the various “wicked problems” facing society (Garnier et al., 2022). Women, especially young women, are less likely than men to believe the media cover them fairly and these perceptions of fairness impact trust in media and news avoidance (Fletcher, 2021; Toff and Palmer, 2019). While various industry and civil society initiatives have attempted to address these concerns over the past 15 years (e.g. the BBC’s 50:50 Equality Project and the Women’s Room initiative in the UK), and with some success, overall progress reporting is sporadic, accountability mechanisms are lacking, and governments and policymakers appear unwilling to seriously engage with gender equality issues in the media (Carter, 2015; Macharia et al., 2025).

Method and analysis

This article draws on material from semi-structured qualitative interviews with women experts from seven NZ universities, undertaken as part of a larger study into female expertise in the news. University researchers are an important group of sources for journalists generally (Albaek, 2011) and in a small country like NZ, the sector is a key repository of expert opinion for journalists: all universities are publicly funded, much of the national research funding is channelled through the sector, and universities have a protected role as “critic and conscience of society” (Universities NZ, 2025).

Focusing specifically on the perceptions and lived experiences of women experts permits the sort of rich, thick data and analysis that is the hallmark of qualitative research (Miles et al., 2020). Additionally, there are clear precedents for women-specific studies in the journalism literature, where the experiences of female journalists, for example, have been closely examined in a bid to better understand how gender shapes their newsroom experiences (e.g. Chen et al., 2020; Miller and Lewis, 2022).

The study’s population of female academics had actively sought to position themselves as “experts” in the public sphere through writing at least two contributions, about their research or area of expertise, for the open access news website, The Conversation. In NZ, The Conversation has become a well-established part of the media ecosystem. Its editorial team comprises three highly experienced former journalists and articles are widely republished in local (and international) outlets, reflecting its “savvy connection to the news cycle” (The Conversation, 2022). Approximately eighty women experts were identified through their self-authored contributions to The Conversation’s NZ edition and invited, using publicly available email addresses on their university websites, to partake in an online interview of about 45 minutes duration. Fifty-two women agreed to participate: the majority were mid or late career academics, and they came from a wide range of science, social science, humanities, education and business disciplines with expertise in topics as diverse as medicine, geography and international relations, religion, sport, and engineering.

In using The Conversation to identify prospective participants, access was gained to a group of women with at least some common interest in promoting their research or expertise publicly, but with usefully divergent experiences of mainstream media engagement. Some women had been successful in translating their desire for profile into media coverage (beyond The Conversation) and others had not; some were proactive generally and others wrote only for The Conversation. This diversity of the sample was deliberate and allows a nuanced exploration of women experts’ motivations and practices around mediated expertise.

All interviews were done on Zoom, and a Zoom audio transcript was subsequently generated, reviewed for accuracy against the recording, and shared with participants for checking and editing. All interviews took place in 2023, and in accordance with the project information sheet, averaged around 45 minutes (ranging in length from 30 to 65 minutes). The project was reviewed by the relevant University ethics committee and all participants signed and returned a consent form, via email, before the interview took place. Participants’ names and any other identifying features are confidential, which in the context of NZ’s small academic community limits the contextual detail which can be provided in the results about individuals’ academic status and disciplines. For publication purposes, direct quotes are attributed to participants using numerical labels (E1-E52).

In the interviews, participants were first asked to overview their academic career, area/s of expertise, and media activities. A series of semi-structured questions then explored their media experiences and motivations in more detail, the organisational context, their observations about women experts’ visibility in the media, and their stance on the overall risks versus benefits of a media profile.

Thematic analysis

Thematic analysis, defined by Braun and Clarke (2006:79) as “a method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data”, was used by the author to analyse the 52 interview transcripts. Following the steps outlined by Braun and Clarke, chunks of interview data were manually coded at the level of each transcript, clustered together across the data set, extensively refined and reviewed. This inductive process was employed to generate a four-page summary of eight key themes, shared with participants in 2024, and strongly grounded in the participants’ lived experiences in the local context. A second and this time deductive phase of coding subsequently occurred following the author’s deep engagement with the literature (outlined earlier) and occurring alongside refinement of the study’s conceptual framework. Capitalising on the flexibility of Braun and Clark’s approach to thematic analysis and the ability to evolve the coding process through the analysis and writing phases, the author sliced and redefined initial themes to better parse the individual, structural and societal-level influences on women experts’ media experiences. This article presents the interview themes concerned with the structural level of news production: “the taken-for-granted (but patterned) institutional practices and norms that frame and shape daily newsmaking” (Preston, 2009: 8). Of course, given the women experts in this study work in universities, any complete analysis of the structural influences on their experiences needs to also recognise the importance of that institutional setting. This, as well as other relevant individual and societal influences on women experts’ experiences with media engagement, will be explored elsewhere.

In a reflexive thematic analysis, as in all qualitative research, researchers must recognise their role in shaping the interpretation of data. Thus, the analysis which follows “inevitably and inescapably bears the mark of the researcher” (Braun and Clarke, 2019: 5), and is informed by the author’s academic and personal interests in gender and media representations, and university and other career experiences.

Findings

This section presents four themes (with one subtheme) related to the journalistic routines and dynamics that women experts perceive as shaping their media experiences: time, timing and currency; framing and conflict; news values (including localness); and the “usual suspects” of news sources. Taken together, the extracts presented below also convey a further relevant insight from this NZ study, which is considered further in the discussion: these women experts demonstrate a good understanding of how the news media works.

Time, timing and currency

The routinely deadline-driven nature of news means journalist and source interactions generally occur within a narrow timeframe; “as a distinct form of knowledge, contemporary news is time-dependent by definition” (Preston, 2009: 53). Interview material captures how women experts’ understanding of time and deadline pressures sees them rapidly weighing up several inter-connected factors when deciding to engage in media work: whether they have any gaps among their day’s other commitments, whether they have time to do a sufficiently good job of what’s required, how often these opportunities come up for them, and how impactful and/or otherwise valuable this opportunity may be for them.

Around half of participants did not consider media engagement to be too onerous if kept within moderation, with many of them requiring a couple of hours to prep for an interview or around a day to write something for an opinion piece or The Conversation, particularly if they were strategic about writing from their research or core areas of expertise, and/or had access to pre-prepared professional resources. Others found any media work to be generally disruptive and best confined to highly specific circumstances (e.g. to publicise particularly important research findings). The main commitment of media work was widely understood by women participants as “the time [needed] to take the thing you want to say and then mould it into the voice and the format that they need” (E28), with participants cognisant of the requirements of different media formats e.g. “[Radio interviews are] quick and easy…I often sit here with notes…where I have to write myself [is] a bit more time consuming” (E19). One participant regarded the professional culture of journalism as deeply incompatible with the nature of their expertise, impacting their willingness to engage and meaning few opportunities were perceived as genuinely beneficial:

They [journalists] want stuff in 24 hours…the message of my work often doesn’t align with that 24-hour turnaround. (E49)

When mentioned, television interviews, particularly if they required travel to a studio and early starts or evening appearances -- but also in the Covid and post-Covid era, if they occurred at home -- were seen as especially time-consuming. E29 described the time involved in a current affairs interview at her home as

A bit frustrating. I had a camera in the house for the whole day and of course the day before you clean the house, right?

For women experts from the university sector, media requests were not always easily compatible with other job and life commitments, which immediately limited their ability to partake; as E25 argued, “men…have a little more flexibility to sneak away and do…interviews”. Several participants reflected that their media work had occurred when their children were grown and less dependent whereas E48, a passionate media communicator, discussed her strong drive to partake in media work with

the biggest problem for me…[being] just the impact on my family ‘cause I’ve got little kids and my husband works full time. We have to make it work.

The timing of a live broadcast interview was also a factor in how doable it felt and again, for women experts, this was often impacted by other life commitments. E15 explained how she had “contemplated sitting in the cupboard with the phone” to mask the noise of her children, cats and neighbours. One interviewee expressed regret about turning down a last-minute opportunity to be on a live radio panel:

I was at a sports event for one of my children…it would have been very stressful to get back in time to be ready…[the opportunity] would have been great…but I guess if you say no they probably won’t try you again. (E36)

Participants who actively enjoyed media work were more willing to accommodate journalists’ deadlines, happy to accept it was on journalists’ terms or not at all, even as this could be disruptive and time consuming:

I’ll do it all sorts of odd hours…the weekend…late at night…early morning…they want it then. They don’t want to wait…they’ll find somebody else…every now and then it gets a bit much but mostly it’s good. (E42)

Anytime anyone contacted me…it’s been…10 years and I’ve never said no to an interview ever…I do find it time-consuming, [but] I love it, I prioritise it…the more you do these things the quicker it all gets. (E48)

Most participants demonstrated an understanding of the importance of currency for media outlets and various comments concerned the subsequent challenges of providing meaningful topical commentary in a fast-moving news cycle. Experts in areas such as politics, business and natural disasters had many opportunities to react to contemporary news events but this meant having to be immediately responsive and experiencing peaks and troughs outside their control:

Because a lot of it is responding to contemporary events…[if I]… see something…nobody else is addressing…because the news cycle moves quite fast …what can I push aside, when can I find some time…at short notice…often evenings or weekends. (E38)

There are times when…I don’t have time or energy or space but I do it anyway because it’s a conversation that’s happening now, and it needs to be done. (E39)

While the fast-moving news cycle created regular but unpredictable opportunities for some experts and barriers for others, the fleeting nature of much media interest was a common consideration in women experts’ decision-making around media engagement. For example: “realising how often the media opportunity is that moment” (E24); “you have to drop everything and do it then” (E36); “if something topical pops up and you want to have an opinion on it, you have to have that opinion right away” (E3).

Framing and conflict

The objectivity model of news means journalists commonly rely on experts to support their choice of frame (Albaek, 2011; Wien, 2014) and/or to nominally present a “balanced” news story through “A versus B” or conflict framing (De Vreese, 2005). These practices, combined with an understanding of their “average” viewer or reader, mean that journalists value experts who can communicate a straightforward message in simple terms. There was widespread awareness of this among participants and some adjacent concern that this well-established feature of journalism was therefore not well suited to discussion of nuanced topics, including those related to gender, or consistent with the way they wanted to contribute to societal debate. Distilling messages was also seen as feeding into some of journalism’s unhelpful binaries. E35, whose expertise had a gendered component, was cautious of the media’s tendency to frame gender debates around overly simplified “sides”:

There’s harm in that…when I engage with media hopefully I’m being helpful but I certainly don’t want to be part of a narrative that causes harm or trauma, or re-traumatises people.

E24 talked about a media propensity for “doom and gloom” angles and moral panics associated with her field (education), meaning her preference to advocate for moderation:

Is the kind of mediocre response that doesn’t engender excitement…it’s easier when you’ve got the real strong position on it.

Similarly, E51 noted

There’s these different variables…[but] mainstream media doesn’t want that…the discourse ends up being dominated by the person who is willing to say ‘oh, that’s terrible!’ rather than ‘well, it is a bit terrible but, you know, we can see the reasons why’.

E32 speculated that male commentators in her primary discipline (geography) were more attractive to journalists because of their greater willingness to “have those bigger conversations” that she – and perhaps other women – were not ethically comfortable with:

A universal, abstract statement…that applies to everyone, everywhere…I don’t do that…people in Western societies need to become more comfortable with uncertainty and with saying ‘well, we don’t know’…women who’ve been on the other side of marginalisation [often] have a much better sense of the limits of knowledge.

News values

Participants’ perceptions of a hierarchy of journalistic news values shaped their attitudes towards doing media work and often helped them make sense of their experiences. It was a commonly held view that mainstream journalists are attracted to light or “quirky” (E32) topics and for some participants, particularly those doing critical research or with expertise outside the mainstream, this led to a feeling of being shut out e.g. “My research is more serious, it’s not sexy or easy to pick up and get good soundbites” (E15). Trying to interest mainstream media in alternative perspectives was difficult:

It’s not like they are…against your ideas, it’s just that they can’t engage with it because they can’t imagine an alternative system. (E30)

The critical stuff around [my topic area] is really hard when we’ve got this really strong neoliberal discourse around individual responsibility…we’re trying to say look at the bigger picture here…[but] there’s a resistance. (E50)

A good chunk of participants had expertise in women’s experiences and/or gender analysis but found this a hard sell with both internal communications staff at their universities and in the broader media environment:

My topic is very gendered…on a workforce that no one cares about, because it’s women’s work …so the comms person doesn’t really understand it or think it’s important. And it’s very hard to get pick up in the media because no one really gives a shit. (E15)

I gave an interview [about a gendered aspect of work] and there was incomprehension on the other side…they were not open to understanding…just against the idea and how this was really bad for business. (E30)

For another participant, bringing a gender lens to media outreach in her field did not tend to go well:

I’d rarely have a conversation about [my field] where I didn’t mentioned feminism and…I think that turns a lot of people off. (E21)

She recounted offering a feminist perspective in a conversation with a female journalist who initially indicated being interested and requested further information:

I sent her a load of stuff and we had a long conversation…for about an hour and then the article came out…and there was nothing, not a word! (E21)

The news value of localness. Over half of the women experts in this study were immigrants to NZ, with most coming from predominantly English-speaking countries including the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Many of these participants felt their cultural background contributed to their media experiences, in both positive and negative ways. The size of NZ meant media outlets were generally regarded as more accessible than in other countries and there was less “competition” from other experts however journalists’ preferences for local angles and sources were sometimes a barrier to these women’s participation. Some participants regarded their accent as helpful when building a media profile. For example, E5 observed that

Kiwis love North American accents…there’s some sort of power in my American accent…a queer reverence…I’ve seen that as part of what…made me an attractive person to talk to.

Conversely, E29 was mindful that when offering critical commentary in her area of expertise she risked being portrayed as “another [foreign person] trying to tell us how to do it”. E2 felt that her North American accent was

Appealing, at least when I first started…international experience…was valued but increasingly, that feels less so…the local voices are more what [journalists] want to hear…post-Covid.

One of the few ESL speakers in the study, who described herself as having a “terrible accent”, relayed how she had been encouraged by mentors, her university communications staff and a journalist to provide radio commentary around her highly specialised area but afterwards, “I never listen to this interview. I feel so awful and embarrassed” (E45).

“The usual suspects” of expert sources: Status, gender and appearance

The perception that journalists routinely make use of a select group of expert news sources was a theme across interviews. Several participants had themselves achieved such status. E5 relayed how her talent and enthusiasm for news work had resulted in countless media appearances and ultimately a deluge of invitations (that eventually burnt her out); she attributed her initial success to having “big energy”, being good at soundbites, and an appealing accent. E48, who loved media work, was highly aware of journalists’ tendency to regularly use the same sources and actively capitalised on this through follow up with journalists and self-promotion:

[I] put myself out there as much as possible. I’ve told [media] people I want to do this…share [every little thing I do] on social media…if you are nice…they’ll call on you again.

Conversely, another regular media commentator (E42) observed that journalists would occasionally mix it up in a bid to bring in new perspectives:

Once you get on their radar…they keep coming back to you although…I know sometimes they will choose not to…talk to me because…they want someone fresh.

Other participants, who had either experienced or observed a similar reliance on the same, usually male, news sources referred to journalists as lazy in their efforts to find more diverse commentators. Awareness of a pattern of routinised source use and its tendency to reinforce the underrepresentation of women’s expertise was identified by several participants as motivation for their own media work. E30 explained how she saw journalists’ patterns of reusing the same sources as undermining women experts, who may already lack confidence:

They will always go to the same people and so those topics that are seen as male…they will…talk to the men [even when] there is a lot of women around…some women are…[rightly] scared and don’t want to interact [but] the media…undermine their expertise by either not asking them or by talking them down…it perpetuates itself…the more we see the ‘wise man’.

Several participants recounted how they appeared to become more attractive to journalists when their credentials were boosted through, for example, taking on important leadership roles, gaining a certain expert status or, as in the case of E33, winning a high-profile international research award. When participants’ expertise was validated in these ways, they observed more opportunities for media work:

When I was president of the [X Society] that gave me a platform to say something. I felt that broadened the scope of what I could talk about. (E37)

The media has never approached me other than…when I have been involved in panels that judge…awards. (E46)

Similarly, E33 relayed how her profile was boosted when she was invited to join a prestigious advisory group that actively made space for her specialist and cultural contributions and “allowed me to have my voice”. Authoring high-profile reports was identified as another portal to media attention; E40 was involved in a nationwide survey which gave her “a huge amount of media attention”. E10 identified a further layer of status linked to her medical qualifications:

I’m a privileged White woman [which ] helps…[being] a woman…brings some [negative] stuff, especially when you talk about gender but I’m also a doctor and that gives me credibility.

While no expert expressed the view that being female was an active hindrance when it came to doing media work, E10 was not the only study participant who spoke about observing undercurrents of misogyny and racism in public life (with these perceptions explored further in a forthcoming publication). Three participants shared stories of uncomfortable or disturbing encounters with male media figures but generally participants’ professional relationships and experiences with journalists – even those which had for whatever reasons not felt productive or enjoyable – were not interpreted as sexist or misogynistic. Several participants observed how gender could be an advantage – for example:

We’re the visible ones…being a woman and offering a female voice helps. The media are aware of wanting to balance …[so] my picture tends to be the one that gets printed on the article…it’s really nice optics for [my local newspaper] to be running a picture of this female academic. (E3)

But participants had mixed feelings about learning they were a token female source. For example, “the journalist said that he needed me because he needed a female” (E36) and the producer “came clean and she said ‘actually we want you because you’re the only woman in the group’” (E37). For E1, it was frustrating to observe the tendency among journalists to approach women experts for comment on the “softer” subfields of their expertise (“we get pigeon-holed”). This pigeonholing of women’s perspectives was also observed in the case of female experts from minority groups, with E7 pointing out that it was particularly unusual to see

A woman of a minority ethnicity in this country talking about something that wasn’t to do with the ethnicity but was actually to do with the subject knowledge they had.

The media’s preference for “visually appealing” women experts was also part of this theme of source status, and several participants reflected on how they saw this shaping their media experiences. E19 explained that while she had done extensive radio and print work she believed “you have to be beautiful to be on TV if you’re a woman”. E15 described herself as

Quiet and serious, I don’t look the part. I’ve got green hair now…I’m fat, I’ve got a friendly face, I don’t wear suits, people…won’t take me seriously as an expert.

E2, who had done a good amount of media work with a female colleague, linked their success to them both being:

Youngish female academics, she’s [retracted] nationality, I’m [retracted]…we have a similar look and sound and general sort of presentability…I’ve enjoyed…being on TV because I like to…look nice …maybe they see that as well and they’re happy to feature someone that they…can [send] to hair and make-up.

In the same vein E35 recognised her media opportunities had likely been shaped by her:

Incredibly privileged position…I am White…youngish… ‘visually safe’…I’m not too challenging to viewers.

Discussion and conclusion

This study has explored how women academic experts’ perceive journalistic routines and values shape their experiences with media work. As in Shine’s (2021: 12) study of Australian women experts, “a lack of time and issues of timing” were important influences on NZ women’s participation in news work: participants reported limited ability to schedule media interactions at short notice, while simultaneously recognising the importance in journalism of currency and “riding the wave”. Only the most dedicated and enthusiastic participants were willing and able to regularly accommodate journalists’ demands, using the limited time outside their usual work hours and/or negotiating with their partners to cover childcare. Given Shine’s findings and broader evidence from the literature that “working women face more time constraints than men” (Cukier et al., 2019: 39; see also GEPI, 2024), the time and timing challenges of news work deserve further scrutiny with respect to their impact on women experts’ continued under-representation. The possibility that the intrinsically time-dependent nature of news (Preston, 2009) contributes to the lower visibility of women experts in the same gendered ways that unpaid care work and household labour reinforce women’s inequality more broadly (GEPI, 2024) would be usefully tested in comparative work with male and female experts, including in non-university settings and different national contexts.

Other journalistic preferences (e.g. for status, “hot” topics) were also perceived by women experts as impacting media engagement, in ways variously experienced as advantageous or limiting. Participants recounted factors which they saw as increasing their media appeal, from their youth and ethnicity to involvement in high profile studies or winning prestigious awards. In this way, journalism’s preference for high status sources may be compounding the institutional barriers already faced by female academics, who are consistently under-represented in senior levels of academia despite the well-entrenched myth of institutional meritocracy (Clarke et al., 2024). Further, an academic ecosystem which links universities with other organisational actors influential in the awarding of grants and leadership roles can result in the accumulation of gender disadvantages for women academics across their careers (Gould et al., 2025).

A handful of women experts reflected on their complicity with gendered media practices, acknowledging how their interest in personal appearance aligned with television’s preferences for “hair and make-up” or the “nice optics” desired by local newspapers. Others, however, told of regularly encountering media indifference to their ideas and expertise, particularly when these related to gender, women’s work and feminism. This same resistance was occasionally encountered in interactions with university communication staff. Accents and “not looking the part” were regarded as negatively impacting some women’s media engagement, consistent with Shine et al.’s (2024) survey of Australian news sources which found reservations about English-speaking abilities, as well as appearance, were significant barriers to media interviewing for women sources.

Women experts’ observations about journalistic preferences, from the desire for novelty in news to the value of aesthetic appeal, also align with empirical evidence about news values (e.g. Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). Their level of familiarity is consistent with Wien’s (2014) observation that researchers have become increasingly knowledgeable and professional in their interactions with journalists but contrasts with Shine’s (2021: 2374) finding that “a lack of understanding about how the media works” contributes to women experts’ cautious approach to media engagement. Although this article does not specially engage with the issue of caution among this sample of NZ women experts, which will be more fully explored elsewhere, it appears there may be an important link between caution and having a clear understanding of the media environment, given the negative experiences of some high-profile women are increasingly well explicated (e.g. Mudgway, 2025; Smith, 2025). In other words, women experts who choose to limit their engagement in media work may be responding in a highly logical way to a contemporary media environment that observation and experience tell them is not receptive to their viewpoints and is increasingly characterised by misogyny and abuse.

Using qualitative methods to explore the experiences of 52 women experts illuminates some of the nuanced ways that media logics may contribute to the marginalisation of women experts’ perspectives and helps create a more complete picture, embedded in women’s lived experiences, of the perceived barriers to better representation. The legacy of manmade news can be seen in these participants’ experience that research focused on women’s work and/or with a feminist lens is not newsworthy, and that commentary from a marginalised perspective, recognising the limits of knowledge, is not highly valued. There is scant indication from the interviews that expert women sources are able to renegotiate dominant frames, suggesting a limited ability to effect fundamental changes in representation without corresponding shifts in the definitions of news and established newsroom practices. As Wien (2014: 440-1) observes, journalists’ tendency to set the news agenda through making initial contact with expert sources and establishing the story’s frame does not leave much space for “new knowledge”. While it is certainly not the case that women’s expertise lies only in topics and frames of interpretation outside of mainstream media values, there is evidence in this study which supports Cukier et al’s. (2019: 38) speculation that women with “non-mainstream viewpoints” are likely to feel discouraged from media engagement. Yet if women experts have as much credibility with audiences as male experts (Greve-Poulsen et al., 2023), there is a clear rationale for better inclusion of any currently marginalised perspectives they may bring to news coverage and analysis. This is particularly urgent given the documented failures of contemporary journalism to inform and facilitate meaningful public debate around society’s various “wicked problems” (Garnier et al., 2022) and the gender gaps emerging in audience surveys of fairness and trust in mainstream news (Fletcher, 2021; Toff and Palmer, 2019). Indeed, diverse representation has been identified as key for rebuilding trust in journalism (Watkin, 2025).

The feminisation of journalism as a profession has not transformed the gender logics of manmade news with at best mixed evidence that women reporters include more women sources in their stories (Fountaine et al., 2021; Niemi and Pitkänen, 2017). Efforts to increase the use of female experts through a focus on training, support and confidence-building risk similarly limited outcomes without deeper scrutiny of the largely invisible gender logics of contemporary news production and content, and importantly, how these are understood and experienced by women experts themselves. Addressing the slow rate of improvement in representation of women as expert news sources means coming to grips with a suite of contributing factors from the personal to professional cultures and societal forces. More transparent and regular auditing, stronger industry leadership, and clearer government expectations for progress and accountability are urgently required (Kassova, 2020; Macharia et al., 2025) if journalism is to finally dismantle its myth of gender equality and provide better representation of women experts.