“I like anytime you can come to an event like this. It just sort of reaffirms what we do and how we do it.”Gayle King, Women’s Media Awards 2016

“It’s highly important. It’s women’s media. It’s identifying and training women in media to be able to stand toe-to-toe in a male-oriented society, to be able to tell the stories to find the stories to make sure they get out there what is accurate and is going on in the world.”Sally Field, Host, Women’s Media Awards 2016

The Women’s Media Center released a series of studies in 2013, based on online surveys, showing how a female can-didate’s chances of winning over voters lessened when the media described her appearance, regardless of whether it was a negative, neutral or positive description.

“One of the things that the Women’s Media Center does: it trains women in media. It has a terrific website, Womens-mediacenter.com...We’re celebrating our 11th year with the gala awards.”

The Women’s Media Center analyzed 27,758 pieces of news content (TV, print, Internet, wires) and found that 62.1 percent was produced by men. As Ms. Magazine cofound-er Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

About 90 percent of sports editors are men, and 90 percent are white. The Women’s Media Center’s 2015 report on “The Status of Women in the U.S. Media” showed that just 10.2 percent of sports coverage in 2014 was produced by women.

We can stop excusing a kind of manhood that belittles wom-en, bringing us down to the level of objects — objects that can be treated with not only scorn, but with actual violence.

“Last year, as the presidential election got under way, re-search conducted for the Women’s Media Center showed that men reported 65% of U.S. political stories in 2014. Research commissioned by the center on the 2012 presi-dential election found that 71% of front-page stories were written by men and that on cable and network TV, political news show guests and experts were 77% men.

“Look at your neighborhood paper and local news station to see how many women are represented,” says Jane Fonda. “When you see an imbalance, contact the Women’s Media Center.”

The 1998 conviction of Jean-Paul Akayesu—a former may-or of Taba, a small commune 40 miles west of the capital Kigali—was a “watershed” moment, says Lauren Wolfe, journalist and director of Women Under Siege. “Until then, rape had been on the books as a prosecutable crime in war, but it hadn’t actually been prosecuted,” says Wolfe. “[Akayesu] was a real sea-change moment.”

Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Centerin Washington, D.C. says that the feminist side of this issue is that, onscreen, women are outnumbered by men as film leads by a margin of 2 to 1. “Which means the fact that Jennifer Lawrence is playing a lead character in an action movie is a big deal—one to be celebrated,” Ms. Burton writes to the Monitor in an email. “Movies tell us who we are and what we can be and the marketers for this movie had a choice of the kind of image they wanted to portray to sell the movie. Rather than choosing a strong, affirma-tive action image of the woman character, they chose one where she was in the violent grips of a male character.

According to the Women’s Media Center, news outlets continue to fall down on the job when it comes to hiring and promoting women of color. Of course, this takes a toll on the types of stories that get told, a particularly dismaying prospect in an era of resurgent misogyny and white supremacy.