Miren Gutiérrez

By Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Jun 9 (IPS) – “We should not be all that surprised that we are stalled,” says Jane Ransom, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), referring to the absence of women leaders in media organisations.

“We have a few generations of educated, free women,” she notes, but this must be considered in the context of many preceding generations in which women were barred from journalism. “Men still control most of the media, and most cultural, financial, and political structures are still male-dominated,” she says.

According to the report “Women Make the News 2008″, published by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, “Progress of women journalists’ careers is still hampered by lingering stereotypes and subtle discrimination. Women journalists continue to face substantial obstacles to full participation in the newsroom — particularly in terms of management opportunities.”

This “patriarchal ideology” seems ubiquitous and culture-blind in the media sectors of many countries.

Editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, Ferial Haffajee, says that a 2006 “Glass Ceiling Study” published by the National Editors Forum and the NGO Genderlinks found that “the larger media contingent in South Africa lags behind, that the number of women in senior positions is not near equality, and that women felt themselves to still inhabit patriarchal workplaces.”

It seems that women’s access to universities and newsrooms is more or less equal, but at some point, their progress stops. Do women “opt out” or are they “pushed out”?

“Women are pushed out because of unfriendly, child-unfriendly working hours,” says Haffajee. “Owners haven’t created crèches or made job arrangements which allow women to thrive and climb. Journalism is a hard slog. Stories happen at inconvenient times, deadline is way beyond normal societal hours, maternity leave provisions are poor. The lack of paid maternity leave, and the unsociable hours of journalism really emerged as huge push-factors.”

Ransom concurs. “My observation is that women in the news media have some extra special challenges,” she told IPS. “Compared to women in some other key professions, such as law and finance, I think women journalists receive less institutional support addressing career advancement, work-life balance, and skills training.”

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By Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Jun 6 (IPS) – Observe any summit picture — you won’t find many women. The mystery of female underrepresentation in the echelons of power persists: after so many decades of the feminist movement, why are women at the helm scarce? A look at the media sector may provide some answers.

“The media is a mirror on society so it needs to be a reflection of that society. If our newsrooms are male-dominated spaces, they will reflect a male-dominated world. That, for me, is not living true to our mission of creating non-racial (in the case of South Africa), non-biased, non-sexist societies,” says Ferial Haffajee, the first woman editor of the South African Mail & Guardian.

Media organisations are the gatekeepers of much of what is known in the public sphere, while journalistic stories contribute to perpetuating stereotypes, or changing them. It is quite revealing, then, to find out who is in the kitchen cooking the news.

“The influence of women in journalism is one of the most central problem areas in feminist media research,” acknowledges a recent report entitled “The Gender of Journalism”, authored by researcher Monika Djerf-Pierre.

It is difficult to draw global conclusions about the role of women in media organisations, since studies are largely focused on specific countries, and deal mainly with western women or with how women are portrayed in stories as sources or topics. So let’s have a look at some examples, even if fragmented.

Djerf-Pierre’s study shows that even in a female-friendly nation such as Sweden, “journalism as a field has remained male-dominated”. (Sweden ranks number one — or the country with the narrowest disparity — in the Global Gender Gap [GGG] published by the World Economic Forum).

A period of tokenism was followed by the upsurge of a critical mass of women who entered the newsrooms in the last 25 years. Today, almost half of Swedish journalists are women, she says in the study. However, three out of four leaders in the media industry are men.

Only in two sectors, public broadcasting and magazines, do women fill more than 40 percent of leadership positions. Djerf-Pierre explains that a general pattern — she calls it “gender logic” — persists: men typically cover the public sphere of politics, business, and power, speaking to male sources and assuming the mantle of objectivity; women tend to cover the private sphere, drawing on female sources and writing in a more intimate style.

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