The EU has been focusing on gender and equality for several years and launched a five-year gender equality strategy in 2020. However, progress is still being made at very different rates in the individual member states. A new research project, Gender Equality through Media Investigation and New Training Insights (GEMINI), will help to change this.

 

- With the project, we want to focus on the representation of gender identity in TV series in Europe and how it can contribute to a discussion of gender equality. In this connection, we will examine which series upper secondary school students in the age group 14-18 watch in order to understand how the series represent and evaluate different perceptions of gender. Based on this knowledge, we will develop teaching materials for an online platform that can be used to deal with gender and equality in upper secondary education, says Associate Professor Kim Toft Hansen from the research group Literature, Media and Society (LMS) at the Department of Culture and Learning, who together with Associate Professor Louise Brix Jacobsen – also from LMS – participates in the project.

Engaging young people through screenwriting contest and video production
The research project will run until 2025 and in addition to the development of teaching materials, the researchers will also launch a screenwriting contest among 14-18-year-olds during the project period.

 

- We want to engage the target group to make short videos for social media and thus debate and relate actively to gender and equality, explains Louise Brix Jacobsen.

The project has just been initiated at a workshop in Rome, and now the researchers are starting to investigate which TV series young people between the ages of 14 and 18 watch, and how gender and equality are treated in the formats that young people spend time on. This is done through focus group interviews in Ireland, Denmark, Romania and Italy.

- The first preliminary studies actually indicate that young Danish people between the ages of 14 and 18 do not watch traditional TV series at all. We are excited to investigate this further, but we are also curious about whether the same applies in the other EU countries, says Kim Toft Hansen.