The teaching guides of the faculties of Communication in Spain: a teaching practice lacking in a gender perspective

Research on the introduction of the gender perspective in higher education -specifically in the field of Communication degrees in Spain- is scarce, considering the crucial role of media content in promoting gender stereotypes in society. Currently, the adoption of this perspective at the university teaching is a requirement from the European Higher Education Area, the Spanish university policies, and the Spanish government legal framework. The objective of this paper is to study, through the technique of quantitative content analysis, the presence and expression of the gender perspective in the teaching guides of the Audio-visual Communication, Journalism and Advertising degrees from 6 Spanish universities. The sample of the study consisted of 812 teaching guides from the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 courses. The results indicate that in 2 out of 8 teaching guides, gender perspective features-related are included mainly concentrated in subjects specialized in gender, so their scope is not transversal to the teaching plan of the degrees. In addition, women are underrepresented as references in the bibliographies, and it is mostly the female professors who intend to correct this bias. We concluded that the teaching guides analysed lack a gender perspective. The results of this research are expected to contribute to raising awareness of the need to include it transversally in the teaching plans of Spanish university degrees.