Dr Sophie Knowles awarded AHRC Curiosity Grant for #MyEconomyToo research

The lack of women in economic news is impacting policy, argues Dr Sophie Knowles, Research Fellow in Journalism at City St George’s, University of London.

To combat this issue, she was awarded the prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Curiosity Grant to carry out the research project #MyEconomyToo.

The project will receive a total funded value of nearly £80,000 between December 2025 and January 2027.

The AHRC grant is awarded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which is the UK’s national funding agency for research.

Dr Knowles joined City St George’s to complete the project with the University’s prestigious Department for Journalism.

Women are underrepresented in economic news

Historically, women have been marginalised from economic power and symbolically annihilated from economic news.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted these inequalities which saw a stark drop in female experts featured in the news. Dr Knowles noticed that when women were featured in relation to economic news, it was primarily in domestic roles.

Explaining her motivations, she says:

It will take close to two centuries to close the economic empowerment gap between men and women and economic crises.

When there is an economic crisis, women are disproportionately impacted compared to men.

Women are often primary caregivers providing more invisible labour and working in less secure or caring industries.

Despite growing awareness of gender disparities in the workplace and public life, economic journalism remains heavily male-dominated.

Experts quoted in financial reporting are disproportionately men, and stories frequently frame economic authority through traditionally masculine perspectives.

The project will explore how economic knowledge is shaped by and for women, and how media practices influence whose voices are heard in financial and policy debates.

Partnering with industry leaders to create impact

Through #MyEconomyToo, Dr Knowles hopes to develop strategies to improve gender equality in economic news and to create tools for women experts to engage news media.

By interrogating who speaks for the economy, who has authority on the topic in public conversations, the research seeks to contribute to fairer media representation and more inclusive economic policymaking.

She will conduct a series of in-depth interviews with women media practitioners and women economic experts.

Through these conversations, Dr Knowles will analyse how professional routines, newsroom cultures and industry norms shape the representation of gender in economic reporting.

The project also includes partnerships with key industry players: the Global Media Monitoring Project, which is the largest and longest-running media monitoring project focused on women; and Women in Journalism, a networking, training and campaigning group for women journalists; and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which is one of the largest independent journalists' unions worldwide.

Dr Knowles will also host knowledge exchange activities later in the year, with plans to organise an online symposium designed to bring together scholars, journalists and policy stakeholders.

The event will build a dialogue on how economic news can more accurately reflect the lived realities of women and other underrepresented groups.

Dr Knowles plans to roll out the project in the Global South.

The Journalism Department’s research into gender

The research project is the first AHRC Curiosity Grant project in which the Principal Investigator is based at City St George’s.

Dr Lea Hellmueller, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the School of Communication & Creativity, said:

This grant is a great success for the School and the Journalism Department.

I'm so pleased that Sophie decided to come to City St George's to work with our Journalism team to complete the project.

It's a highly competitive funding scheme, with an average success rate of 6.9%.

Her project shows a great fit with our departmental research mission in journalism to generate world-leading research on question such as journalism & gender equity with lasting benefits to the industry.

The #MyEconomyToo research builds on the Expert Women in News project carried out by by Professor Emerita Lis Howell and Professor Emerita Suzanne Franks, which looked at the gender split of experts in broadcast news and tipped the scales towards gender equity.