A report produced by the Communication Research Group for Channel 4 in 2016 covered 500 hours of television on all the main UK channels. It found that men were twice as likely to appear on TV as women, and that older women were especially poorly represented. Female characters were also five times more likely to suffer sexist abuse on screen than men, mainly in comedy shows. Sport and news programmes have the greatest underrepresentation of women: just 2% of sports presenters or pundits on TV are female.
Films shown on TV have only 26% of main roles filled by women. This rather confirms research in the US by the New York Film Academy on the relative presence and depiction of women in Hollywood films (see Figure 1).
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