Agency – The Informed Opinions Training Centre

Informed Opinions (IO) aims to amplify women’s voices to achieve gender balance in media by 2025. IO makes it easier for journalists to find female sources and deliver strategic communications and media engagement workshops that support women in speaking up. Canadian news media chronically underrepresented women’s voices and perspectives, which increased only 4% in terms of the sources quoted or interviewed in the past quarter century and currently sit at 27%. This has profound implications for what issues are prioritized and whose experiences and insights inform policies and spending. In seeking to bridge this gender gap and address the unmet demand, IO plans to scale its existing social enterprise and fee-for-service training by increasing academic and corporate client activity. Generating additional financial resources will enable IO to train more marginalized and under-resourced women and expand in-houses tools such as the innovative Gender Gap Tracker, a research tool which provides real-time measurement of women’s voices in Canadian media.

Grant amount: $40,000