‘Blatant spin’: SBS accused of sifting data to show ‘sexist’ Australia

SBS has been accused of cherry-picking research results to show that Australia is overwhelmingly sexist towards women.

Media personality Yumi Stynes hosts SBS’s new documentary Is Australia Sexist? Picture: Richard Dobson

SBS has been accused of cherry-picking results from research on sexism in Australia to produce a “blatant propaganda exercise” documentary that concludes Australia is an overwhelmingly sexist country towards women.

The documentary, Is Aust­ralia Sexist? — due to air on the publicly funded broadcaster on December 4 — is based on the results of a survey commissioned by SBS and production company Joined Up Films. Macquarie University’s Cath­arine Lumby and Amirah Aftab commented on the findings.

The survey, described as the “largest survey of its kind”, asked 3599 men and women in April this year a variety of questions on topics such as sexism, feminism, gender and online harassment.

MORE: Bettina Arndt writes SBS’s ‘sexism’ doco is just blatant propaganda

According to the survey, 40 per cent of young women — aged between 18 and 25 — and 18 per cent of women in total have ­experienced sexual harassment in public in the past 12 months.

“In Australia, our society is built around a simple but powerful idea that everyone gets a fair go,” the program’s host, writer Yumi Stynes, says in the documentary’s trailer. “But is life in the Lucky Country harder for a woman than for a man? A startling report suggests it is.”

Bettina Arndt, a sex therapist and clinical psychologist, was ­interviewed for the program about statistics that show 76 per cent of Australians feel men suffe­r from sexism and 45 per cent of Australians — 37 per cent of women and 52 per cent of men — feel feminism has “gone too far”.

Likewise, only 28 per cent of women identify as feminist. She was asked to contribute to a “strong men’s rights segment” by the documentary’s producer and director, Darren Hutchinson from Joined Up Films.

Is Australia Sexist? Hosted by Yumi Stynes, this new documentary goes undercover to expose the truth of sexism in Australia in 2018. Premieres December 4 on SBS. @yumichild #IsAustraliaSexist pic.twitter.com/ELCkb89L7v

— SBS Australia (@SBS) November 2, 2018

Ms Arndt has been told her interviews will not be included in the final, 51-minute product. She said the program, which includes hidden camera footage of women being harassed, appears to be “exactly what you would expect to hear from SBS, which invariably promotes the feminist narrative on such matters”.

“We are promised shocking findings about our sexist country showing how hard life it is for women dealing with the wage gap, the constant underlying threat of rape,” she writes in The Australian. “SBS’s stated values of being ‘fair, clear and transparent’ are hardly demonstrated by suppressing key results of a commissioned survey”.

A spokeswoman for SBS said the documentary sought to explore the area of sexism and harassment against women as the “main angle … The survey generated a huge amount of data, and we can’t explore every angle of complex issues surrounding sexism in a one-off documentary”.

Professor Lumby referred questions to SBS: “I didn’t conduc­t the survey and wasn’t ­involved in editorial decision-making. I was one of many who were simply asked to give their opinion on the data.”