Surveys often begin with a standard question: are you a man, a woman or other? According to Tonny Krijnen, Associate Professor and media scholar at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, this is a common pitfall. Together with Sofie van Bauwel (Ghent University), she co-authored the book “Researching Gender and Media – Tools, Guidelines, and Ethical Reflections”, which helps students and early-career researchers to take gender seriously at every stage of their research, from the initial research question to the final analysis.
A sister volume to a theoretical book
The new book is, as Krijnen herself puts it, a sister volume to an earlier work: “Gender and Media”, a theoretical introduction to the relationship between gender and the production, content and consumption of media. The third edition of that book is due to be published as early as next year.
The inspiration for the new book came from experience in supervising students and scientists. “We supervise many students and young colleagues in this field, and we noticed that we had to tell them the same things over and over again,” explains Krijnen. “A research method may well be fine, but if you incorporate gender into it, you have to take all sorts of things into account. So we thought: let’s put that down in writing.”
She emphasises that the book is therefore explicitly not a methodology textbook in the traditional sense. It is a toolbox explaining how gender is relevant when using a particular method and how students can address this in their research.
More than just a checkbox next to ‘sex’
Why is this necessary? Krijnen gives the example of a standard questionnaire. “It often says ‘sex’, and you can tick whether you’re male or female – nowadays, sometimes ‘other’ is included too. But when the research is about gender, confusion arises. After all, your sex is different from your gender.”
Gender is, moreover, a fluid concept, certainly for the current generation. “Male, female, other is actually just a poor way of asking about it. Tools have been developed specifically to do this better, and students need to be familiarised with those tools.”
According to Krijnen, there are plenty of good books on how to design a survey, but none of them address the question of how to measure something as complex as gender. This is because the meaning of gender is linked to ethnic background, class, level of education and sexual orientation. “None of those books explains exactly how to do that.” And then there is the ethical aspect: asking people about their sexual orientation raises a question that not everyone feels comfortable answering. The book addresses this issue as well.
A toolbox of tips and resources
The book is organised around the three fields of research that are also central to “Gender and Media”: media production, content and consumption. For each method, the authors briefly discuss a well-known case study. “It’s good to know where something comes from,” says Krijnen. They then guide the student through the steps of the method, reflecting at each stage on the pitfalls and the opportunities for getting it right.
The authors mainly describe existing, widely used methods. Anyone who really wants to get to grips with a method is referred to reliable sources. In addition, the book contains practical tips, for example on the question students always ask: when have I read enough literature? “There are no hard and fast rules for this, and we explain that too.” The exercises are drawn from both authors’ own teaching experience. “If you let students spend half an hour working on an assignment like this during a seminar, they learn something that would be very difficult to explain clearly in any other way.”
AI: a useful stepping stone, not a replacement
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also covered in the book. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain that research always follows the same types of steps, whether quantitative or qualitative. AI can be a useful tool in this regard, but it also has many limitations. Krijnen points out that students and researchers must check which guidelines and agreements their own institution follows.
To demonstrate what AI can and cannot do, she asked a chatbot to explain what the television series “Killing Eve” is about. In the book, Krijnen gives the example of a television series in every chapter; in the chapter on AI, it is this series. “If a bachelor’s student were to hand this in, I’d think: quite well done. But if you look more closely, there are several places where something is really missing.” Her conclusion: a useful stepping stone, but you need to approach it critically. And plagiarism is “a kind of academic mortal sin”, she notes in the book.
Taking a closer look at your own motivation
A recurring theme in the book is the role of the researcher themselves. Krijnen often sees this happen: students choose a topic because they have complex feelings about it. That’s fine, but it can cloud the research. “Sometimes a student finds something interesting, but hasn’t really thought through why it interests them. Then you’ve got a personal goal.”
The risk? “That you find what you were looking for.” According to Krijnen, a personal motivation is perfectly fine, but it does require a robust research design. “We keep coming back to that.” Personal considerations can also colour your judgement. You read an article and think it’s ‘silly’. “That’s fine, but then you have to ask yourself: why? Does it have to do with my values, or is there actually a mistake in it?” Nobody is immune to that, she says: “We all have this trait.”
Whether you are transgender yourself or, conversely, have difficulties relating to certain groups: qualitative research assumes that your own perspective will always colour your findings. According to Krijnen, various self-reflection methods have therefore been developed to ensure that you do not end up writing an autobiography rather than conducting research. Nevertheless, it remains a limitation: sometimes you simply fail to spot reliable information. “That’s a shame, of course.”
Activism within the discipline
Although the media discipline is home to many activist academics, the book does not delve deeply into activism in research. However, it is mentioned, says Krijnen, pointing to the wave of change that #MeToo also set in motion within research, including additional funding. At present, femicide is a key topic in research that is frequently funded, according to Krijnen, with major European projects investigating, amongst other things, how this type of violence is easily swept under the carpet in news coverage. She believes it should not be too readily labelled as domestic violence: after all, it involves men murdering women.
Much of this activist research is qualitative and focuses on how politics takes shape in media content, particularly in popular media. “People still spend the vast majority of their media consumption on television, even if they no longer own a television.”
From television to social media
Krijnen and her co-author both have backgrounds in television and film studies, and this is evident from the examples they give. Nevertheless, there is a chapter in which social media and its consumption serve as a common thread.
She acknowledges that social media is difficult to interpret: there’s a lot of content and it’s all very different. But certain images are greatly amplified there. As an example, she cites the ‘I’m just a girl’ movement: “very clean, cosy, cute photos of breakfast, but also very white and very straight”. There are counter-movements, for example on TikTok, which rebel against this and respond to one another, but which ultimately often end up doing the same thing. And anyone who says ‘I’m just a girl’ quickly conjures up the image of a white, young girl. “That excludes a very large proportion of girls.” The question then becomes: what is being excluded, and who sets the standard? Clearly mapping this out requires sound research skills.
The difference with television? “Television has a longer narrative; there’s scope to flesh things out and provide context. On social media, it’s always brief, and you quickly end up in a bubble.” For factual and informative media, that’s a major problem, because it’s difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. But when it comes to perceptions of gender, Krijnen doesn’t see things on social media that are all that different from elsewhere. “It’s repetitive, and perhaps it’s becoming even more one-sided.” There’s a clear idea of what’s beautiful and what makes a ‘nice girl’ or a ‘nice boy’, and there’s little to challenge that. “There are bound to be pockets of resistance, but you have to go looking for them.”
An AI actress as a case study
For the third edition of “Gender and Media”, Krijnen examined Tilly Norwood, an AI actress with her own Instagram account. She found the comments under a single post fascinating. Norwood’s appearance fits an international ‘standard image’: light-skinned, brown hair, brown eyes – a sort of global average – but ‘just a little too slim, with just a little too much bust and bottom’. According to Krijnen, this reflects a standard ideal.
At the same time, the content is satirical. The AI actress created a song that is a compilation of existing music videos, featuring references to artists such as Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears, alongside ironic lyrics. “I thought it was absolutely hilarious,” says Krijnen. Others thought it was dreadful and saw the entire television industry under threat. Still others saw an advantage: no one can harass an AI actress – a reference to the #MeToo movement. “Those are all interesting arguments, but it’s a completely different story from the straightforward experience of simply enjoying an evening’s Netflix.” She has noticed that the content looks more professional than what users create themselves, although she doesn’t know what people are capable of at home.
Web scraping: is it actually allowed?
Big data and large language models as methods of analysis are barely touched upon. The authors themselves have too little experience with these, says Krijnen. However, digital methods are touched upon here and there, such as topic modelling, “a cool way to organise your data, but you need to know how to do it”. For those who wish to delve deeper, the book refers readers to relevant literature.
Krijnen does, however, describe the ethical aspects of, for example, ‘data scraping’. “What are you actually doing when you just go and scrape someone’s Instagram? Is that allowed? Does the fact that something is available mean you’re allowed to take it? There’s a very fine line between what is ethically justifiable and what isn’t.” Her example: qualitative analysis software such as ATLAS.ti has an AI plug-in that can help organise themes. “But you’ve conducted confidential interviews, often on sensitive topics, such as someone’s sexuality. Would that person be happy that you’ve fed the interview into an AI plug-in, thereby making it part of a much larger whole?”
What students should take away from the book
What does Krijnen hope students will take away from the book? “That they understand that research always involves a number of steps, whatever kind of research you’re doing, and that you really do have to go through all those steps. And that gender isn’t that simple, and that it offers food for thought at every stage of the research.”
Her pride in the result is clear. “We’re proud of this; it’s turned out rather well,” Krijnen concludes modestly.
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