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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