Speech by Martin Ajdari, President of Arcom, at the Arcom conference on the representation of women in the media and online sexism.

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

dear friends,

I'm delighted to welcome you here to Arcom, a few days after International Women's Rights Day, a day which is always a special occasion for us as audiovisuel and digital regulators.

Firstly, because one of the missions entrusted to us by the legislator is to ensure respect for the rights of women in audiovisual communication, through their fair and equal representation, through the fight agains stereotypes, sexist prejudices, degrading images or violence against them.

And, more broadly, because we are all convinced at Arcom that equality between women and men is one of the key factors in the audiovisual industry's ability to play its full role in promoting social cohesion.

To this end, and within the framework of our 2015 deliberation, which is currently being renewed, we support publishers on a daily basis - with benevolence and high standards - so that the presence of women on air, and in the different types of programs (news as well as creative or entertainment), through the place and role they are given, contributes to the construction of more egalitarian representations and collective imagination.

This support can take the form of tools that we propose, and sometimes ask publishers to implement (whether it's staff training, the creation of directories of female experts, or the UNESCO manual on the treatment of sexist and sexual violence...). It also takes the form of monitoring indicators (KPIs) and, more broadly, through the production and publication of numerous studies - firstly to note progress where it has been made (and there is some), but also to document the margins for progress that remain, and to propose solutions.

Take, for example, our reports

• on equality in sport, published in the wake of the Gaming Games, which showed that, despite obvious progress, there are still gaps,
• or on the treatment of violence against women, published a year ago, which showed that, while the media now speak far less of "dramas of passion" when referring to feminicide, the systemic nature of the problem is still all too rarely mentioned.

And it is the publication of two new reports that brings us together today:

• The first concerns the presence of women in news programmes in the audiovisual media for the years 2024 and 2025. It is based on a new methodology that is and will be the subject of a dialogue that I hope will be nourished with the editors;
• The second, Arcom's first work on gender equality entirely dedicated to social networks, is devoted to online sexism, based on a study of nearly 20,000 comments and messages on X and YouTube, and existing academic literature;
• Finally, we'll be having a broader discussion, with Violette Viannay and Valérie Nataf, on the protection of women's rights and gender equality in the information space as a whole.

Before giving the floor to Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier, our mistress of ceremonies for the day, who is unrivalled in her dynamism in tackling these issues within the Arcom college, I'd like to share with you a few observations drawn from my reading of these two reports.

The first is that they illustrate very well the profound difference in regulation challenges between media service editors on the one hand, and FPs or social networks on the other.

• On the one hand, we directly regulate TV and radio channels, notably through their agreements and our deliberations,
• On the other, we organize the supervision of digital services, which have no editorial responsibility, but must meet means obligations adapted to their role as increasingly active intermediaries: implementing resources for the moderation and removal of illegal content, assessing the risks -often described as systemic- produced or amplified by their services and providing remedies).

These are therefore two very different regulations for which we are responsible, each with the aim of protecting the rights of women, ensuring their better representation and fighting agains stereotypes. These are therefore common challenges, and we share a determination to ensure that our regulatory actions, under the 1986 law and under the RSN, converge towards a common ambition.

Second observation: in the audiovisuel sector, the editors' commitment, led by the public service editors, has led to significant progress over the long term. The proportion of women on set has risen by almost 10 points in fifteen years, in news programmes as in others, and now exceeds 40% every year.

And women are now in the majority, particularly in the role of female presenter (in the major news sequences that are still news broadcasts and news magazines), where they express themselves on average more than on sets presented by men.

Even so, we're still not at 50% women on set, with even greater gaps when it comes to so-called regal themes. There is also a greater deficit for older women and female politicians, to take just two examples.

And while the quantitative weight of the audiovisual media in their reference universe (audio or video) has been declining in recent years, they remain the place where public debate is anchored and imaginations constructed.

Mythird observation is that the report on online sexism, beyond its own lessons, clearly illustrates the fact that our collective action there is less mature, both in terms of the completeness of the diagnosis and the levers of action that can be mobilized.

Whereas for television and radio, we can rely on uniform rules and measurement tools, and on the ongoing efforts of publishers, the digital world is characterized by incipient regulation, innumerable contents, scattered knowledge and players of varying degrees of goodwill. And neither the rules nor the practices are comparable to those observed in the audiovisual media, whether in terms of parity or sexist offenses.

In this respect, the report we are publishing is full of clues to the scale and seriousness of online sexism, but also testifies to the progress we need to make:

• to better understand this phenomenon, in collaboration with civil society, researchers and associations ;
• to help all the relevant players take it into account - the latest report from the French High Council for Equality makes a number of proposals in this area;
• to integrate it into our regulations, within the framework of the regulation on digital services, in particular through the action of the observatory of online hate that we relaunched last autumn;
• lastly, through constant vigilance on the part of all on manifestly unlawful expressions of sexism and masculinist tendencies, which must not only be revoked but prosecuted.

On these issues, Arcom will continue to play its part with determination, both by continuing to support progress in the audiovisuel field, and by studying in greater depth the mechanisms at work online, so as to be able to combat more effectively the risks they engender for women and for society as a whole.

I'd now like to hand over to Laurence and the Arcom team for a detailed presentation of these two reports. Thank you, Laurence.