Where are those missing faces?
I Arul Aram
Women constitute 52% of the world¿s population yet make up only 21% of people featured in the news. Women are most underrepresented in radio where they are only 17% of news subjects compared with 22% on television and 21% in newspapers. This is the major finding of a global study on gender issues in news media conducted by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in 2005. The data suggest that very little has changed since WACC¿s 1995 and 2000 studies. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2005 shows that the marginalisation of women in news media is still very much a reality. The release of the report in London on 15 February 2006 will be followed by three weeks of Global Action on Gender and Media (through blog discussions, workshops, polls, surveys, debates, comments, etc).
GMMP 2005 is a one-day snapshot (16 February 2005). According to WACC, these data are supported by the results of its GMMP 1995 and 2000, and numerous other regional and national studies conducted over the last 30 years. GMMP 2005 collected data from 76 countries, keeping in mind the DIVerse socio-cultural identities and the availability of volunteers to collect data. The data were collected through the voluntary effort of hundreds of inDIViduals and organisations involved in communication and advocacy. About 13,000 news items on television, radio and in newspapers were examined. Margaret Gallagher was the consultant for the project. The study looks at television, radio and newspapers but leaves out the internet. In this write-up, I shall give some of the findings of the study and discuss some implications in the Indian context.
Some findings
Women`s views and voices are marginalised in news media. Men`s voices dominate in hard news. Men are the majority of news subjects in all story topics. Even when women do feature in the news, they are more likely to be found in `soft` stories such as celebrity and arts where they make up 28% of news subjects and least likely to be found in `hard` news stories about politics and government (14%) and the economy (20%). Men dominate as spokespersons and experts. 86% of all people featured in new stories as spokespeople are men. Men also make up 83% of all experts. Women are much less likely to be considered experts in media coverage. This shows that there is a gender bias in the media though many women have already come up in several walks of life.
Women are often present as voices expressing personal experience (31%) or popular opinion (34%). Women are more than twice as likely to be portrayed as victims than men. Female and male victims are common currency in news programmes. But women are disproportionately represented in this way with 19% of women portrayed as victims compared with 8% of men.
News is still mainly reported and presented by men. The only exception is among television presenters. 57% of television news stories are presented by women, probably because women - particularly young -- are considered more presentable from the male point of view. Elsewhere women are a minority. This imbalance is most evident in newspapers where only 29% of newspaper items are written by female reporters. For newspapers, the study took byline stories as the base for gender identification.
Female reporters are more likely to cover `soft` news. Men tend to cover the `hard` topics - news that is perceived as `serious`. Only 32% of stories on politics and government are reported by female journalists compared with 40% of stories on social issues such as education or family relations. But the question, ?who decides on what the female reporters cover - whether it is their own choice or that of their superiors??, is kept out of the scope of the study.
More female news subjects are found in stories reported by female journalists. In stories reported by women, 25% of news subjects are women compared with 20% of news subjects in stories reported by men.
Women are unlikely to be the central focus of a story. Only 10% of news stories worldwide have women as a central focus. The proportion of these stories varies widely across different topics. Women are central to the news story in 17% of `soft` topics such as celebrity news, sports or social issues. Only 3% of stories on economics and 8% of stories on politics and government have women as a central focus.
News stories are more likely to reinforce than challenge gender stereotypes. Only 3% of stories challenge stereotypes compared with 6% of stories that reinforce gender stereotypes. News content, in general, reinforces gender stereotypes by depicting a world in which women are relatively invisible. Gender (in)equality is not considered newsworthy. 96% of news stories worldwide do not highlight issues of gender equality or inequality. The stories that do highlight gender equality or inequality make up only 4% of news stories.
For more information, go to: http://www.whomakesthenews.org
The idea that emerges is that news media owners and senior journalists are mostly men and they decide what news about women should come out. And the news is often reported from a male point of view. Keep in mind that people spend a lot of time as consumers of the media and thereby shape their social attitudes, women should have a greater share as news subjects and journalists.
WACC and its partners worldwide join with UNESCO in offering a challenge to all media producing daily news to give editorial responsibility to women editors and journalists to direct the news on 8 March 2006 - International Women¿s Day.
The study has brought out very important facts on gender issues in the media. To make the quantitative analysis more systematic, the study could have gone ahead with statistical analysis instead of just presenting the data in terms of percentages. The results got (from the study of media texts) and their interpretations could have been corroborated with the stakeholders in the issue such as women journalists, men journalists, news media bosses, women news makers (of different age groups), and the general public (media consumers). Or else, at times, one may interpret the results wrongly without having an understanding of the social context. But then, the study has a vast canvas and it has achieved its objectives set in quantitative and qualitative terms.
Missing faces
Let me now discuss the gender imbalance in the Indian media context. When I did my masters degree programme in journalism at the University of Madras in the late 1980s, three-fourths of my class were women. But not even one of them is in the media now though two women worked as newspaper journalists for a few years. Where are those missing women? Is it that media organisations are hostile to them? The trend has changed in the last 10 years. With the proliferation of private TV channels in the mid 1990s many women entered journalism. This is probably because the new set of owners of these channels were more open to women. Conservatism in the mainstream newspapers gradually gave way, and more and more women started entering newspapers as well. To start with, some women employed in newspapers were those from the upper strata of society looking for some work to gain status, but not necessarily with great journalistic enthusiasm. But later, career-minded women from the middle class started entering the field in large numbers. They saw in journalism a way to express themselves. In general, they have better patience, persistence and perseverance than their male counterparts. This may be an urban phenomenon but surely a trend in the right direction. The increase in the number of women joining the profession is still not in proportion to the high number of women taking to journalism education. In fact, women come to journalism with better language skills and general knowledge than their male counterparts.
Not that women journalists do not have problems at workplace. At times, misbehaviour against a woman journalist particularly involving a senior man is brushed under the carpet, and the affected woman is subtly eased out of the job. When a journalist has a problem even civil society will not come to her help, as civil society derives its power partly from the publicity it gets through the media. Problems of a woman journalist at workplace can be multi-fold. It could be that a junior may not respect her just because she is a woman or a senior may ill-treat her. At times, non-journalist staff such as pre-press staff and drivers may not respect her. Particularly men who maintain male-domination at their homes find it difficult to digest women playing their professional roles. This is also true when a journalist comes in contact with male chauvinistic news sources. But the fact that more and more men are coming out of their male chauvinistic cocoon is a welcoming factor for women journalists.
Women¿s perspectives
Women journalists naturally bring in women¿s perspectives. Let me cite two instances in post-tsunami coverage where the women angle is not all that highlighted in the media.
Within three months of the disaster, many widowers have started remarrying. The reason attributed is that the men cannot manage their household and bring up their children without a wife. In fact, the deceased woman¿s sister or some other close relative is often forced to marry these men. At times, there is not much age difference between their daughter and their new wife! Here is a rare piece that talks about the plight of the widows, written by a woman journalist, Jaya Menon, for The Statesman.
Left an orphan with two children Nishanthan, 7, and Nivedha, 4, Porchelvi, 25, of Kallar suffers severe depressions following the death of her husband Ayyappan in the tsunami. It is difficult for widows, young or old, to get married. While social norms encourage widowers to get married again, they frown on widows remarrying. ?We will not allow her (Porchelvi) to get married. How could she? She has to look after herself and her children. If there is someone willing to marry her, then the village elders have to permit it,? said Ezhachi, a young woman, who lived in a shelter adjoining that of Porchelvi at the Kallar rehabilitation centre. ?I would like to get married again after a year, perhaps,? Porchelvi whispered to this journalist, mindful of her neighbours sitting just outside her shelter.
The journalist could get such intimate details because she might have mingled with the group being studied to get a woman¿s perspective - observing and listening to the issue at hand, and at the end of the day writing down all that one remembered just like an ethnographer. She has used her gender identity to her advantage to get easy access to women, given a patient hearing and encouraged them to discuss an intimate topic like marriage.
Another instance in the post-tsunami media coverage is a male-centred rehabilitation. The boat-centric rehabilitation advocated by the majority of civil society and supported by the media is male-centred. This failed to take into account that many fisherwomen were having an independent economy - earlier, they had the power to own nets and lend them out for a rent to their husband and other fishermen. But the tsunami and the rehabilitation process have made fisherwomen an appendage of fishermen.
Bright future ahead
Old journalism textbooks talk about a young woman journalist who went to a cinema theatre to review a film but came back saying she could not review it as the hall caught fire. This might just have been a fictitious instance to teach news sense in a male chauvinistic way. Such an incident did take place in 1997 when Delhi¿s Uphaar theatre caught fire, and 59 people died and over 100 injured. The women reporters there did not flee the scene to report to their seniors that they did not have a story. They covered the fire mishap, risking their lives.
Many of the good stories the tsunami produced were written by women who extensively toured the waves-ravaged spots. With enterprising women joining the profession, the talk of women being relegated to ¿soft¿ stories is the thing of the past. GMMP 2010 is set to see a quantum jump in women as journalists, news makers and news content. Let us hope and work towards that goal.