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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Q&A: ‘If Journalism Becomes Further Marginalised, Look Out, World…’
Interview with Chuck Lewis, Fund for Independence in Journalism

ROME, Oct 29 (IPS) - Shrinking newsrooms, declining sales and audiences, vanishing foreign correspondents, concentration of ownership, shrivelling papers…is journalism imploding? Can independent journalism survive?

“Yes,” says Chuck Lewis, founder of the Centre for Public Integrity, and one of the most respected voices in journalism today. And the answer is non-profit journalism.

Lewis is a former producer of the CBS show 60 Minutes, and a journalist-in-residence at American University in Washington. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and many other publications. A pioneer of the non-profit model, Lewis speaks with Miren Gutierrez, IPS Editor-in-Chief about the future of journalism.

IPS: So, the news is that in-depth, independent journalism may endure…But investigative reporting is expensive, it could be risky too. Who will pay for it?

Chuck Lewis: Civic-minded, wealthy individuals who believe in the concept of an “informed citizenry” and public service journalism — local, regional, national, international…Great work itself will begin to attract “buzz” online, and other revenue sources could open up, from advertising, to subscribers/members, to paid partnerships with existing hollowed out media corporations desperately seeking content, etc. In some parts of the world, such as Europe, government funding or direct public subsidies (as with the BBC) are possible too, with its related issues…

IPS: In your recent article ‘The Non-profit Road: It’s paved not with gold, but with good journalism’, you say that while increasingly newspapers will develop into “print-digital hybrids” (an expression coined by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and editor of the liberal U.S. magazine The American Prospect), advertising revenue is still to come up to editorial payroll levels. So what happens in the meantime?

CL: In the meantime, downsizing will continue, bureaus will close, investigations will not be undertaken or funded…Some media organisations will cease to exist or become unrecognisable vis-à-vis news as we have known it…Celebrity-headline-entertainment-sport-weather pap instead, masquerading as “news”.

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Q&A: Shipping Still At Sea
Interview with David Cockroft, Int’l Transport Workers’ Federation

ROME, Sep 3 (IPS) - A first officer’s certificate to navigate a ship and deputise for captain. No training, no skills. Price, 4,500 dollars. David Cockroft sent shock waves through the shipping business when he bought that certificate back in 2001 to show corruption in shipping registries.Cockroft’s campaign to protect seafarers and promote the shipping industry has continued since then. In an interview with IPS in 2004, the British champion of seafarers worldwide spoke of his efforts to counter the negative effects of U.S. legislation introduced after Sep. 11, 2001. And that was not the last of the challenges. Now he has taken up the environmental issue after Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Efthimios E. Mitropoulos declared that environment is the main issue facing maritime transport today.IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez spoke to Cockroft, now Secretary-General of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, ahead of World Maritime Day, Sep. 27.

IPS: You have been the ITF Secretary-General since 1994 and outlived four consecutive congresses, the last one in Durban. What has changed in the world of seafarers since you started, and with the Flags of Convenience (a foreign flag under which a vessel is registered in order to reduce operating costs and avoid regulations)?

David Cockroft: The world of seafarers has changed a great deal since 1994, and so has the ITF. We have strengthened our global presence in defence of seafarers rights in ports all over the world so that substandard ship owners know that there is a growing chance that an ITF union somewhere will provide support for exploited seafarers. At the same time we have established a strong dialogue with decent ship owners and managers who have an interest in maintaining standards.

When I attended my first ITF Congress as General Secretary in Geneva in 1994, there were fewer than 2,000 Flag of Convenience (FOC) ships under ITF agreement — and the number was falling. Today there are more than 8,000 and rising. And more than half of those ships are covered by the world’s first globally bargained collective agreement within the framework of the International Bargaining Forum.

Of course, the other major change in the world of seafarers is that they are currently in very short supply. The number of cases of exploitation and abandonment of seafarers has fallen drastically, but not because ship owners have all suddenly become paragons of virtue, but because freight rates are at a historical peak due to the continued growth of export/import based economies, particularly China.

Skilled seafarers at present can virtually name their own salaries. Everyone connected with the industry knows that this cannot go on for ever. At some stage there will be a major downturn and suddenly — as previously — there will be a glut of tonnage chasing a declining market.

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Artículo en español…

Panamá América: Presentan Novela

In August, I presented my book in Panama, where the real facts in which it is based took place.

Recientemente la autora Mirien Gutiérre, presentó su novela “La Ciudad de las Cigarras”, basada en una investigación periodística. La actividad se llevó a cabo con el auspicio de El Hombre de la Mancha, CELAP y Editorial Literaturas. En la imagen Gilberto Arias, Miren Gutiérrez y Dilmar Rosas.

Judy De León y Rolando Rodríguez. [enviar por e-mail]

Edith Castillo y Marco Castillo. [enviar por e-mail]