Feminist Caroline Criado-Perez says:

Women make up 51% of the world’s population. But to look at the way we represent that world, you wouldn’t think it.

Only one out of ten political news stories in the UK feature women as the main subject, and only 13% of global news stories do. Women make up only 20% of experts in the media, but 80% of pictures considered relevant to the news story. In other words, only there for decoration. And in perhaps the least defensible figure of all, women make up only 28% of speaking roles in Hollywood films.

This lack of representation matters beyond the obvious point that a world that is made up of 51% women should not be consistently representing itself as between 70-80% male. It matters because of the well-documented impact that role models can have on women.

Women have been shown to be affected by a phenomenon called “stereotype threat”. This is where women will do worse in a field in which they are stereotypically thought to be weak. Something as simple as ticking a box to declare your gender before taking a maths test has been shown to negatively affect women’s performance in the test. But it’s not all bad news, because there is a very simple remedy to this unfair disadvantage: providing women with role models.

In one Harvard study, two groups were given a maths test, one by a woman presented as incompetent in maths and one by a woman presented as competent in maths. The latter group did much better. In another US study, the presence of a single female senator or candidate for the Senate raised women’s ability to name a senator to 79%, in comparison with 51% in states where there was no female senator or candidate. And in a Swiss study, just placing a picture of either Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel at the back of a room when women were delivering a speech was found to enable the women to give better (judged by both themselves and the audience) speeches, and to speak for longer.

By routinely representing women as a minority, accounting for little more than 20% of the world’s population, it is clear that we are doing women a disservice. Role models clearly affect women in quite dramatic and tangible ways. And yet we continue to deny women access to the stories of inspiring and pioneering women. These women are out there, we are just ignoring them. It’s time to change that.

'What makes a good or bad female role model?'