Women make the news
By Sakauntal Narasimha Posted Sun, Apr 1 2001
UNESCO asked news organizations around the world to allow women into positions of editorial management for a week, marking International Women’s Day on March 8. A male editor skeptically joked it was like allowing the fabled camel to put a nose into the tent.
“You mean, like the story of the camel and the Bedouin?” quipped the male resident editor of a newspaper chain, when told about the initiative. “Last year it was for a day, this year it’s a week, next year maybe a month, then a year — and then pushing us out with a vengeance, eh? Is that the idea?”
A female psychologist explained his sarcasm as entirely predictable. “It’s the backlash, you see, triggered by a sense of insecurity when the status quo gets threatened by women’s advancement,” she says.
Reactions from media organizations asked to participate in Women Make the News 2001 ranged all the way from veiled hostility to defensive backing away. The two news organizations for which I write gender columns welcomed the idea but decided not to take part in the UNESCO initiative.
N.C. Gundu Rao, associate editor of the Deccan Herald of Bangalore, one of the leading English dailies of south India with a 1.3 million readership, says the issue is complex.
“If we splash a rape story on page one, we could be accused of sensationalism; if we downplay it, we get accused of being gender insensitive,” he says.
The paper has carried a gender column since 1984 and has a high percentage of female editorial staff. However, the only woman associate editor on staff retired four years ago, and finding a woman senior enough to take over for a week was impractical.
Also, as Rao points out, “Whether we like it or not, in India, political news takes precedence in a daily paper, and in prioritizing the day’s political developments. It would make very little difference whether we had a man or woman as editorial decision-maker, since the scope for manipulation is limited.”
Connected to this is the fact that women make up less than 10 percent of political positions, and if politics become pre-eminent, women and their concerns automatically get sidelined.
Rao also claims that it is the right mindset, rather than the editor’s gender, which becomes crucial. “Even male editors with empathy for women’s issues can promote gender equity,” he says. The paper has, indeed, carried frequent editorials and lead stories on gender concerns, including coverage of the Beijing conference, the U.N. session on Beijing Plus Five last year, and the women’s reservations bill pending before India’s parliament.
Newstime of Hyderabad, India, with a readership around 400,000, is also gender sensitive. Editorial and op-ed pages regularly carry strong pieces on women’s issues. Some of its editorial comments are the best on gender issues in the nation. Male Executive Editor S.R. Ramanujan points out that women have edited Newstime’s magazine section for some years now, with full freedom on selection and display.
“It is women journalists who shy away from accepting greater responsibilities because of the universal dilemma of familial obligations versus career demands that women face,” he says. He adds that there was “no need to resort to gestures like putting women in charge for a week — it would have made hardly any difference to the paper’s coverage.”
Perhaps, as in business, some women in editorial chairs in the media also feel they have to think like men and downplay gender in order to be perceived and accepted as competent or successful. Nonetheless, as a lark, some of us decided to try out an experiment to see if there really is a difference between editorial choices of men and women.
We culled news items at random, typed them out on slips and distributed one set to a group of women trainee journalists and a duplicate set to male trainees and asked each group to prioritize the issues and lay out the paper. The items were the following: Railway minister quits, World Bank loan for roads, new electoral alliances in the south, WTO talks stalled again, Ulsoor Lake to be revived, opposition demands probe into legislators’ expenses, association for harassed men, industries neglecting safety norms, Supreme Court on compulsory retirement, stock market crashes, Parekh arrested, woman appointed foreign secretary, seed dumping threatens food security.
One man associated with an environmental group and all of the women thought the Ulsoor Lake item merited importance because of the growing water and pollution problems in the metropolis. Women also perceived safety norms in industries as more important, while men saw electoral alliances and scam allegations as more important.
Interestingly, both groups saw the foreign secretary’s appointment as meriting just a paragraph. As the women put it, this was bound to happen, no big deal. The appointment is by seniority, and the first batch of women who joined the civil service during the ‘60s are now reaching seniority. It would have been news if a woman had not been appointed.
An open-house discussion followed on the two different displays put together by female and male groups. At the end of the session, I concluded that women in general show greater concern for the larger good of the populace, while men are more fascinated by power equations and maneuvers. Compared to the older generation of journalists, younger males are more gender sensitive. Initiatives like Women Make the News 2001 are still necessary to make the news coverage more balanced and responsive to the needs of a group that forms half the population, and to sensitize the populace to the handicaps that gender continues to place on women. Although in the Indian media there is no pay discrimination, this is still not true in other regions of the world, so we need to keep focusing on such anomalies.
And finally, for good measure, the group decided to point out to Rao that women journalists are “not camels, they are the same species as the Bedouin, if only he’d care to notice, and refusal to share tent space amounts to blatant selfishness.”
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Women in the Newsroom
-The number of women journalists in the media around the world has decreased by 20 percent last five years.
-In some countries, the figures for women in the media are astonishingly low. In China, only 6 percent of media workers are women. In Japan, only 8 percent are women. The figures of women in the newsroom are 12 percent in India and Malawi, and 16 percent in Mozambique.
-Eight percent of broadcasting managers and 14 percent of managers in the print media are women.