WUNRN
Women’s European Coalition Against Media Sexism
What Is WECAMS?
In March 2013, three feminist associations -
DonneinQuota for Italy, Chiennes de garde for France and Object for U.K. –
founded an European coalition under the name of WECAMS (Women’s Coalition
against Media Sexism) with the specific aim to end sexism and gender inequality
in the media in all Europe, starting from our first target : advertising.
All three groups campaigned against sexist, objectifying
and dehumanising representations of women in their own countries for many years.
We objectively achieved a higher public
awareness on this problem but couldn’t draw political attention about it.
Our governments are not working seriously to
stop sexism and follow EU Resolutions.
On the contrary, they abdicated to
self-regulatory organizations (SROs) for advertisement all judgements regarding
sexist ads. The same thing is happening in all Europe.
In our opinion, this is a big mistake. We
think only National Women’s Rights Ministers - in accordance with feminist
groups - have the right to issue precise guidelines regarding women’s
representation in the media.
In fact, no self-regulatory organizations
(SROs) respects European Resolutions, even if DonneinQuota, Chiennes de
garde and Object tried to push them.
Moreover, even if countless studies
demonstrate the discriminatory nature and harmful effects of such advertising,
most SROs still consider sexism an issue of ‘taste and decency’ rather than one
of discrimination. As a consequence, complaints against sexist ads are upheld
only if they are likely to cause ‘serious or widespread offence’, and a great
deal of sexist advertising is judged inoffensive.
WECAMS Actions
Our first action was to meet, together with
three MEPs (Silvia Costa for Italy, Sylvie Guillaume for France and Mary
Honeyball for U.K.) EASA people (European Advertising Standards Alliance), the
federation of European SROs.
Our intention was, first of all, to push them
to respect the following EP Resolutions:
·
“Impact
of marketing and advertising on gender equality”, on September the 3
rd 2008
·
“Fighting
the sexist stereotypes in medias”, resolution number 1751 adopted by
European parliament on June the 25th 2010
·
European
Parliament resolution of 12th March 2013 on eliminating gender stereotypes
in the EU, number 2012/2116INI
These resolutions ask advertisers to stop
using sexist stereotypes and member states to issue
rules so that advertisers would not use sexist stereotypes without sanctions. Then, as each European country has
its own SRO with its own code, we asked to have only one code in all Europe.
We met Easa people twice, on November the 6th
2013 and February the 13 th, three months later, and all we got was
their promise to consider how it could use its standard-setting role to help
ending sexism in advertising.
Our second action was to push the European
Council to issue a directive against sexism in advertising to oblige all Member
States to respect it.
For this reason, on March 8, 2015 we launched
our petition on Change.org.
Till today, we reached only 3 243 supporters.
We need help from you, from
all organizations gathered here to forward it to their members, so we can
collect more and more supporters.
Here are the links to our petition:
www.change.org/NonAuxPubsSexistes
What’s the Problem ?
1. All advertisers still
think that sex sells. In our opinion, it’s not true and not only because more
and more people want to buy ethic. We need a serious study on this matter and
funds to do it
2. There are no rules
against sexism in the media in general but especially for advertisements.
That’s why we decided to ask, through our petition, to the European Council to
issue a directive