Take the survey on gender diversity in Canadian news media

The results of this survey will provide crucial information about representation in newsrooms.

SABRINA WILKINSON | J-Source

[~] J-Source is conducting a national survey of women, transgender and non-binary journalists in Canada. This project aims to gather information about these individuals’ experiences working in Canada’s newsrooms, and the type of employment they hold.

This survey will provide crucial and otherwise unknown information about the representation and experiences of women, transgender and non-binary journalists in Canada’s newsrooms, as well as a benchmark that the news industry can look to as managers seek to improve hiring practices, and that J-Source can later revisit to measure progress.

Given the variety of employment arrangements that characterize journalistic work, this survey is open to women, transgender and/or non-binary individuals who work in journalism. All research participants in this survey will remain completely anonymous, unless they specifically give consent or permission to be identified. The data collected from this survey will be viewed only by the research team. This survey will take about 20 minutes to complete.

The survey is one of four being distributed to individuals working in journalism in Canada to obtain data about gender representation and diversity in Canadian journalism workplaces. If you are a woman, transgender and/or non-binary journalism professor or instructor working in a journalism department at a Canadian college or university, please contact us at jsourcereportingfellow@gmail.com to receive a copy of a survey tailored for you. If you are a newsroom manager or journalism program chair and can provide demographic details about your workplace, please contact us at jsourcereportingfellow@gmail.com to receive a copy of the demographics survey.

This project is funded at arms length by CWA Canada. The output of this research will be a series of articles focused on different elements of gender and journalistic work as well as a long-form article outlining the survey’s statistical findings. These articles will be published on J-Source and by CWA Canada in late 2018 or early 2019. Data from this survey may also be used in an academic journal article.

J-Source is grateful for the insights provided by a variety of groups and individuals during the development of this survey, including Tristan and D of the Gender Variant Working Group, The 519 and Dr. Nicole Cohen (University of Toronto). All final decisions about this survey were made by the J-Source research team.

Data collection for this survey will conclude on Sept. 30.

If you have any questions about any element of this project, please e-mail, Sabrina Wilkinson, research lead, at jsourcereportingfellow@gmail.com, or H.G. Watson, managing editor of J-Source, at hgwatson@j-source.ca .

Sabrina Wilkinson is the J-Source/CWA Canada Reporting Fellow. She is also a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London where she investigates the politics of internet policy in Canada.