Women's protest and International Women's Day in the Australian media

This paper examines the frequency and content of Australian media reporting of International Women's Day between 1970 and 2005. The data presented here has been drawn from the protest events database compiled as part of the Mapping the Australian Women's Movement (MAWM) project. While quantitative analysis of the data collected has revealed definite trends in the number and type of event recorded, in this paper I have taken the opportunity to use the materials collected for this purpose to more closely examine how the Australian media has responded to and reported women's activism, using International Women's Day (IWD) as a case study. Mining the material in this way also allows us to at least partially negate some of the weaknesses of using protest event analysis to examine feminist activity (Bagguley 2009). This is achieved by considering gaps in media coverage as well as the way the 'public identity' (van Zoonen 1992) of the women's movement can be constructed in the media in ways that can work counter to the aims of the movement.