Praveen

https://doi.org/10.64823/ijcml.2601004

Despite decades of expansion in Indian journalism, women remain structurally underrepresented as news subjects, sources, bylined writers, television panellists, and newsroom decision-makers, and this gap is increasingly compounded by unequal digital access and rising online violence that make sustained participation in the profession harder rather than easier. This paper synthesises evidence from major cross-national and India-specific monitoring studies published between 2019 and 2025 to assess whether this disparity has narrowed and whether these compounding barriers have eased. Drawing on the Global Media Monitoring Project, UN Women-Newslaundry newsroom audits, the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report, and UNESCO-ICFJ studies on online violence, the review finds that women accounted for just 14% of news subjects and sources in India in the most recent nationally coordinated count, down from 22% in 2010; that women wrote roughly one in four print bylines and held almost no top editorial positions at sampled newspapers; that the South Asian mobile internet gender gap stood at 32% in 2024, more than double the global low- and middle-income country average; and that 75% of women journalists surveyed globally in 2025 reported online violence, up from 73% in 2020, with reports of offline spillover more than doubling. The paper concludes that gender disparity in Indian journalism has not meaningfully narrowed and, on several indicators, is worsening, and argues that closing this gap sustainably requires media organisations to combine leadership reform with digital-safety and connectivity measures, an approach for which women-led outlets such as Khabar Lahariya offer a working model.