Invisible yet Again: The Underrepresentation of Women’s Climate Work in the Media

Beedles, Perelandra

Abstract

Climate activism attracts a significant number of women in the UK, including politicians such as Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett, academics such as Julie Doyle and Richa Sharma, and community activist such as Gail Bradbrook (Extinction Rebellion) or, more locally based, Helen Holcroft (Aigburth Community Cycling Club, Liverpool) and Afka Ray (Guardians of Nature, Preston). In the media too, a lot of the work being done to decarbonise film and television is being conducted by women: production managers who are overwhelmingly women in the UK industries.

Yet, when we conducted research with a local community about who they could think of when they thought about climate change, the names that cropped up were all men: David Attenborough and George Monbiot in particular, with Chris Packham mentioned at other moments. What do these responses say about how the media represent British climate activism? And what does this reveal about the invisibility of women’s climate work in the British media?

In this paper, we hope to draw attention to the fact that the media currently represent climate activism in a way that can be understood as deeply gendered. Representations include a focus on law breaking, trouble making and politicking, thus traits that are often associated more strongly with masculinity, while actual climate activist work often includes more feminine gendered aspects such as organising, bringing a group together and dealing with mundane and local rather than national concerns. Thus, media representations seem to feed into perceptions of activists themselves (see Geiger and Swim, 2018), but also need to be understood within the larger context of media representations of climate change as an emergency and catastrophe (Pickard, 2021) as well as very traditional gendered discourses about work which value some forms of work over others (Friedan, 1964). In this paper, we will reflect particularly on the invisibility of women’s climate work both in the industry, based on Perelandra Beedles’s PhD which takes an ethnographic approach to teaching sustainability to production managers, and the under-represented activism of local community groups, based on Elke Weissmann’s research into local climate activism and community voice which combined ethnographic fieldwork with the making of TV programmes.

Citation

Beedles, P. (2024, June). Invisible yet Again: The Underrepresentation of Women’s Climate Work in the Media. Paper presented at MeCCSA Climate Change Network conference, The University of Westminster

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: MeCCSA Climate Change Network conference
• Conference Location: The University of Westminster
• Start Date: Jun 18, 2024
• End Date: Jun 18, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 20, 2024
• Publisher URL: https://www.meccsa.org.uk/networks/climate-change-network/