By Miren Gutierrez*
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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.
