Recently there has been much discussion of the underrepresentation of women in the media industry. It can be easy to lament about the situation, difficult to understand the reasons, and even more difficult to actually do something about it. How can an industry work towards gender equality, when many other industries and the culture at large reflect these biases?

Enter UNESCO’s Women Make the News initiative. This advocacy initiative, starting with International Women’s Day and lasting through April 30, aims to promote gender equality in the media across the world. According to a UNESCO report, women make up 36 percent of reporting jobs and 27 percent of management jobs in media companies worldwide. This year’s initiative focuses on the difficulties for rural women to access media, and gives those in the industry suggestions of how to participate. Read more

Journalist? Check.

Female? Check.

Great new idea for using digital media to deliver journalism? If you can check yes here too, this opportunity is for you.

The International Women’s Media Foundation is offering its second round of three $20,000 grants in its Women Entrepreneurs in the Digital News Frontier program. The first awards, meant to encourage females to expand their role in the digital news media landscape by becoming entrepreneurs, were made in 2011. It’s only open to U.S.-based women journalists (full-time, part-time or freelance).

In addition to funding to get the ideas off the ground, the organization will offer coaching and mentoring from leading digital news media experts to help their start-ups succeed.

The deadline to apply is March 2, and the group will notify winners in April. That gives you just shy of a month to pull the perfect pitch together. This could be your chance to turn your “if only” idea into a “finally” finished product. Stuck for ideas? Check out what the 2011 winners worked on:

• Jeanne Pinder — Clearhealthcosts.com, a site that aims to bring a clearer picture of the cloudy world of healthcare pricing to the masses in a consumer friendly format. More background.
• Maria Balinska — Latitude News explores how Americans are connected to international events and helps them understand how the U.S. itself fits into the global news picture. More background.
• Lissa Harris and Julia Reischel — NewsShed is a spin-off of the founders’ Watershed, which delivers original reporting to the rural Catskills “news desert.” The NewsShed twist is that it launches only-only and self-sustaining news sites in some of these under-covered and under-served communities. More background.

Inspired yet? Read the FAQ and find the application on the IWMF website.