Vera Paunovic, the chairing coordinator of the Women’s Parliamentary Network, highlighted the achievements and objectives the Women’s Parliamentary Network has realised under the idea of promoting solidarity among women, knowledge and expertise. “The women MPs have set up the Women’s Parliamentary Network with the intention of encouraging women to take part in political and public life. Right now, the Women’s Parliamentary Network is in its second mandate and keeps expanding its activities and improving its work each year”, said Vera Paunovic, adding that the Women’s Parliamentary Network has so far organised three national and one regional conference and submitted six amendments, four of which were accepted, to the Bill amending and modifying the Budget System Law, for the first time in the history of Serbian parliamentarism.

Zorana Mihajlovic, President of the Serbian Government’s Coordination Body for Gender Equality, said that the notion of gender equality usually spurs discussions on violence against women and women’s economic empowerment, while the position of women in public life remains in the background. “We are here to work together with the media on a different representation of women in public life and to make them visible”, opined Zorana Mihajlovic. She stressed that the very questions posed to men and women active in public life are different, which is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Snjezana Milivojevic, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, presented the results of Who Makes the News, 2015 GLOBAL Media Monitoring Project which is conducted every five years. Milivojevic mentioned that this is the fifth in the series of research projects, launched the same year as the Beijing Declaration on gender equality, and it shows the presence of women in a specific part of public life – the media. The one-day monitoring covering 18 media and 258 texts showed that women were the subject in 14% of political topics and women experts made up 7% of news subjects. Speaking of who made the news on the day of the monitoring, women came up with 71%, while men were in managing positions, according to the research.

Stefana Miladinovic, a coordinator of the Women’s Parliamentary Network, opened the discussion with the media representatives and MPs, and the meeting was also attended by Jan Lueneburg, Head of the OSCE Mission to Serbia’s Democratisation Department.

Click here to watch the presentation of the results of project Women in the Media.