According to an extensive global study of women and journalism around the world, fewer news stories in Iceland report on women, or are reported by women, and the country is actually below the Scandinavian average.
The Global Media Monitoring Project, which published the report, noted that 28% of news stories in the Icelandic media were about women. By contrast, other Scandinavian countries average 30-33%.
However, the report did note that “although Icelandic internet news produced the lowest absolute number of news subjects in multimedia content relative to the rest of the sample, this was the only country in which more than one half of female news subjects (55%) were featured in such content.”
Nonetheless, only about a third of news stories in the Icelandic media are written by women, again slightly below the Scandinavian average. Of those, women were less likely to write on “hard” news stories – such as the economic collapse – than men. Also, about 40% of news stories were said to reinforce gender stereotypes, while only 13% challenged them, and half did neither.
The report in its entirety can be read here.