New Zealand's media "regressed" to having among the world's most male-dominated news agendas last year - but World Cup cricket was partly to blame.
The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that women declined from 26% of people reported in New Zealand news stories in 2005 to 23% in 2010 and just 18% last year.
New Zealand has dropped from well above a global average of 21% of women in the news in 2005 to well below the global average of 24% in the latest 114-nation survey.
"As the rest of the world makes progress, New Zealand is in fact regressing," the New Zealand section of the latest report said.
Ironically, New Zealand has among the world's higher shares of female reporters (47%) and presenters (59%). But most of their stories are still about men.
"It's so disappointing," said Massey University journalism lecturer Dr Cathy Strong, one of the New Zealand authors. "We have a huge percentage of the workforce fronting and doing the stories who are women, but they are just pulled into the machine that is already there."
The global surveys have been run since 1995 by the Toronto-based World Association for Christian Communication, which describes its mission as "working with all those denied the right to communicate because of status, identity or gender".
The latest survey monitored news stories on March 25 last year. New Zealand media that day were dominated by the Black Caps' win in the Cricket World Cup semifinal, which was splashed across five news pages of the New Zealand Herald. (The survey measured only general news in newspapers and news bulletins, and not sports pages or sports bulletins).
As a result, a massive 35% of general news stories in New Zealand media that day, compared with 11% globally, were about sports, arts and celebrities.
The second-biggest category in New Zealand (28%), and the biggest category globally (27%), was social and legal stories.
New Zealand also gave slightly more coverage to crime and violence (15%) than the global average (13%).
But our media gave far less coverage to politics and government (New Zealand 11%, world 24%), the economy (New Zealand 8%, world 14%) and science and health (New Zealand 2%, world 8%).
"While the cricket headlines mean March 25 was 'atypical' in many respects, it is also not unusual for sports stories to dominate the news agenda in NZ," the report said.
"It is also not unusual for such stories to be heavily male-dominated, as they were on monitoring day. For instance, across the five news pages the NZ Herald devoted to cricket reportage, there were no stories written by female reporters and only one instance of a female voice [a fan]."
Largely due to the cricket, women declined from only 15% of the people reported in New Zealand sports, arts and celebrity stories in 2010 to even fewer (12%) in the latest survey.
Mentions of women also dropped in social and legal stories (down from 36% to 26%) and stories on crime and violence (down from 38% to 13%).
Women's mentions were virtually unchanged in stories on politics and government (20%), the economy (22%) and science and health (33%). They did not increase in any category.
Overall, New Zealand's ranking for coverage of women slid from 52nd out of 109 countries in 2010 to 86th out of 114 last year.
